October 9, 2004
ROCK REVIEW | POLLY JEAN HARVEY
Sneering at Heartbreak, Snarling Her Way to Survival
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
Polly Jean Harvey isn't exactly after entertainment when she performs. At the Hammerstein Ballroom on Wednesday, starting a two-night stand, she was after catharsis: the power of a primal beat and an untamed voice. With a few chords and some pithy words, Ms. Harvey opens abysses where passion is an elemental force that's just as likely to bring devastation as joy. And it's all in her singing, as her voice swoops and wails, snarls and pierces.
Through her career, Ms. Harvey has repeatedly decorated and then torn down her music, and she is back in her most telling and primitivist mode. Right now, she's in sync with rock's latest back-to-basics impulse; she unleashed her voice well before Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs appeared. But she has never bothered to be trendy.
Songs from her 1992 debut album, "Dry" (Too Pure/Island), fit easily alongside material from her new one, "Uh Huh Her" (Island), on which she plays everything but drums. Her recent lyrics are even more blunt, and less likely to bother with myths or metaphors, than her old ones. A decade ago, Ms. Harvey imagined herself as Tarzan's mate, Jane, or as a 50-foot woman, while her newer songs present only an unfettered "I." For her, love, power, desire and vulnerability make an explosive mixture: "Your lips taste of poison/You're gonna be left alone," she snarled in "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth."
To Ms. Harvey, simplicity and abandon are matters of deliberate choice. She has always been one of rock's most striking dressers. On Wednesday, she wore white go-go boots and a white dress with a silk-screened image of Animal from the Muppets between her legs that also looked like a bloodstain: purity and pain together. Her band stomped and slid through blues, garage-rock and odd-meter riffs, each one measured and deliberate in its effect. Josh Klinghoffer flailed at his guitar, worked distortion effects with his amplifier or played glassy, unwavering chords, and every so often, the keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman appeared, once just to hold a single, sustained note with one finger.
She paced each song, and her set, as if only the concentrated moment mattered: bursts of accusation and confessions of longing, "The language of violence/The language of the heart," as she sang in "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore." Of course, as each song unfolded with tempestuous clarity, her sense of drama was supremely entertaining. But she evaded the show-business routine of the explosive finale. Instead, her last encore was the bleak, tolling drone of a song from the new album, "The Darker Days of Me and Him." It was not a blast of release, but a somber resolve: "I'll pick up the pieces/I'll carry on somehow." No one doubted it.
Polly Jean Harvey plays the Avalon in Boston tonight and the Electric Factory in Philadelphia tomorrow.
