Pinpointing Mick Harvey’s identity as a musician has always required a little triangulation. Of his three main points of reference, the closest is Nick Cave, whom Harvey played with in their fledgling band Boys Next Door, then the Birthday Party, and on to the Bad Seeds-- whose primal menace and eerie tenderness Harvey added to immeasurably. Harvey also spent years in Simon Bonney’s collective Crime and the City Solution; by the 90s he’d added a third coordinate, French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg, the source of material for his first two solo albums, 1995’s Intoxicated Man and 1997’s Pink Elephants, the latter of which dared to offer a single Harvey composition. When Harvey left the Bad Seeds in 2009, it was as a superb multi-instrumentalist who had aided, abetted, or interpreted many great singer-songwriters, but who had contributed shockingly little to the world as a singer-songwriter himself.
Harvey’s 2011 solo album Sketches From the Book of the Dead was his first since leaving the Bad Seeds, and it was also his first disc of all original material. While solid, its jazz-folk melodrama suffered from sounding like the average of his three big touchstones. With Sketches’ follow-up, Four (Acts of Love), he’s returned to a more comfortable ratio of originals to covers. It’s a harmonious alchemy. None of the artists Harvey has chosen to cover is surprising; among them are Roy Orbison, Van Morrison, Exuma, the Saints (whom Harvey has covered before), and PJ Harvey (whom he’s covered, produced, and played with).
Four (Acts of Love) oozes curdled lust, broken obsession, and morbid romanticism. It’s a self-described song cycle-- and it’s actually structured as a cycle rather than an arc, bookended by the tracks “Praise the Earth (Wheels of Amber and Gold)” and “Praise the Earth (An Ephemeral Play)”. The two click together to form a tarnished ring, one that describes the act of love as an epic boom-and-bust. Better yet, the songs shed the shadows of Harvey’s bosses and prior influences-- and own the fact that Harvey is no longer a mere sidekick, but rather a contemporary of Michael Gira or Bill Callahan with just as singular and stentorian a voice, if less assured of its power. Through a fluttering filter of reverb and weaves of languid jangle, Harvey sings sweetly and huskily of oblivion, pining for the hereafter like it’s the girl that got away.
“Glorious” is Harvey’s duet with PJ Harvey, although she wisely plays a supporting role as Mick drones on laconically about debilitating love; if she raised her voice any higher, it wouldn’t be a Mick track anymore. The most potent droning, though, is saved for the Morrison cover, a take on the darkly jaunty Astral Weeks classic “The Way Young Lovers Do” that bobs along on an ambient ebb. That subtlety informs most of the album, only letting up on its semi-acoustic cover of the Saints’ “The Story of Love,” which taps into the song’s punk roots for its clunky second half. Four (Acts of Love) is made up mostly of such slivers and fragments, and that adds to its strength; Harvey is trying out new things, wrestling with universals, and grasping at a new way to tell stories through song-- for him, at least. And even if it’s stretched thin and unsatisfying in spots, Four is our most distinct glimpse of Harvey yet.
