PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)

I don't recall reviews relieved at her accessibility, but maybe your memory is better than mine. I remember it being described as her "in love" album or whatever, which I suppose by default is accessible.

I always assumed a lot of the high praise for "Is This Desire?" came from it being the first new album of hers people heard after getting introduced to her by "To Bring You My Love."

Male critics love it when female (and male) artists Find Love.

I think everyone generally loves that. But when I first heard it, the very first listen (which I remember, on the train, with a CD walkman and an early advance of the album) I thought it was so, so dark. Like "Tunnel of Love" or something, an album about love and being in love but totally cloaked in shadow and doubt.

"Beautiful Feeling" nails that.

I haven't been paying attention to the lyrics on THSDP so I haven't had any cringe moments; I'm enjoying how these songs immensely.

"Male critics love it when female (and male) artists Find Love."

i did not know this! i thought they liked it when people were pissed off.

misery's cool until it actually makes you feel uncomfortable or alienated

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea [Island, 2000]
If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire. It's a question of whether you use music to face your demons or to vault right over them. Either way the demons will be there, of course, and nobody's claiming they won't catch you by the ankle and bring you down sometime--or that facing them doesn't give you a shot at running them the fuck over. Maybe that's how Harvey got to where she could enjoy the fruits of her own genius and sexuality. Or maybe she just met the right guy. Tempos and pudendum juiced, she feels the world ending and feels immortal on the very first track. The other 11 songs she takes from there. A+

I know it's impolite to put it this way, but sometimes getting laid can really be good for a person. On the recorded evidence--with no claim to any lowdown on Polly Jean Harvey's actual private life, a mystery as closely guarded as the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the formula for Coke--that's the secret of PJ Harvey's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which even she allows is the happiest-sounding album she's ever made. What she daren't suggest is that it may also be the best.
The shift is first apparent in the music, which is, not to beat around the bush, fast. Way more easeful than the tightly wound, dynamically extreme bluesism of the career-launching Dry and Rid of Me, it's also way livelier than 1995's critical triumph To Bring You My Love, where Harvey's desperate carnality took a sharply metaphysical turn, and 1998's rhetorical question Is This Desire?, the answer to which was maybe. While her austere sonic signature remains, the vocals are discernibly more relaxed, the tunes welcoming and even expansive. Listen for shadings on the guitar attack, too--piano, organ, marimba, is that bandoneon? The album's an up from the first strums of "Big Exit," unquestionably the most rousing opener of her career.

Granted, maybe you'll smell shtick even so--our Polly, getting archetypal with the elementals again. After all, "Big Exit" does meditate painfully on human suffering. But the song's aesthetic thrust is all in the two lines of euphoria her ruminations try to rationalize away: "I'm immortal/When I'm with you." That's why it's so rousing. As she reports in the redolently titled "This Is Love": "I can't believe that the axis turns/On suffering when you taste so good." Long blessed with uncommon talent and success, Harvey can finally accept her "bad fortune slipping away."

Harvey has always been sex-obsessed. But there are better things to do with sex than obsess about it--enjoy it, for instance. And though the love affair the album describes or invents may end badly--e.g., the furious "Kamikaze," or the lovely "The Mess We're In," sung mostly by Radiohead's Thom Yorke--at least it sounds like a true affair, rather more full-bodied than "Robert DeNiro, sit on my face." Harvey and her beau ideal dance and get drunk, walk through Little Italy and sit looking at the skyline from a Brooklyn rooftop. Maybe they'll fulfill the dream of the finale: "But one day/We'll float/Take life as it comes." Or maybe she'll attain that state of grace with someone else. Whatever happens, this album will be there to remind her how happiness feels.

Rolling Stone, Nov. 9, 2000

no trolling RS reviews! too late...

Well, that's Xgau for you.

misery's cool until it actually makes you feel uncomfortable or alienated

and then it's art (man)

im ignoring the lyrics and like djp im enjoying this mick harv is god

Suddenly remembered that I saw her twice behind "Stories," once at a club but the other opening for U2! (This is back when Margaret Fiedler was in the band.) What struck me was despite a decade of critical praise and rabid fans and releasing an "accessible" album that got great reviews, I felt like no one in that place knew who the fuck she was at all. A useful reminder of scale.

Was that the last album she properly toured behind?

nah there was a big les tour

Maybe she just doesn't tour the States? There have been one-offs here and there, I guess.

Honestly I'll still stand by the actual rock songs on Stories, they're mostly fantastic. It's the moments when the tempo drops that let it down, and unfortunately there are lots of them.

The only albums I genuinely love all the way through are Dry and LES, but Is This Desire has her highest highs almost unquestionably.

Just starting the new one again. It's the first time I've heard Hope Six in a month and the clumsy way in which the lyrics are forced into the melody would put the Manic Street Preachers to shame.

nah dude she toured the states for les. there's a sickkkk soundboard recording of the san francisco show circulating.

OMG that stories review.

xpost Yeah, it looks like she played ... 4 shows in the US behind it, two in NYC, two in CA (one of those Coachella). Looks like her 2009 tour with Parish was more extensive.

oh my bad.

Good album. Might even turn out to be a great one.

I have the new one but haven't listened yet, so for now I'll just post this dyn-o-mite performance of my favorite song from Is This Desire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZR4QYRi5Hc

OK so on first pass I like the album -- without paying a lot of attention to the lyrics, but the ones that stood out to me seemed more like fragments than complete thoughts. I don't get the sense she's up to anything too straightforward. I like the rhythms and the saxophone, and her singing.

there's a sickkkk soundboard recording of the san francisco show circulating.

― kurt schwitterz

http://www.npr.org/event/music/135519051/let-san-francisco-shake-pj-harvey-in-concert

"Medicinals" is righteous but am not surprised that ILX posters would be outspoken in their cynicism about traditional medicines, animism, etc.

This album is so bad and annoying I'm now frightened to revisit her earlier records in case the Emperor's New Clothes feeling persists.

I'm liking it fine, especially the sax.

Between this and Blackstar, I'm liking a lot more sax-heavy records than usual this year.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/hiphopdx-production/2014/04/Big-Boi_04-09-2014.jpg

this album gets worse with each listen :(

I'd been sort of dreading listening to it - a PJ Harvey album that's great if you tune out the lyrics is not really a great PJ Harvey album - but there's nothing as clunky as the opening track elsewhere. It's definitely at its best when the music is at its most brutal or most elegiac though - The Ministry of Defence is astonishing, and the second half of River Anacostia is like wow.

Enough of the jauntier ones though. Looking back on LES there were definitely moments where she was just the right side of pushing it, and that album's acclaim was like carte blanche for her to go well over that line. Something about the project feels misconceived even when the music itself is lovely.

The way she sings "a displaced family eating a cold horse's hoof" is just... no. There are some real crimes against scansion throughout.

I thought this was pretty good on first listen but less so on the second go. Agree about the clunky scansion. I like the opener a lot regardless, weirdly the verses remind me of 'Looking for the Magic' by the Dwight Twilley Band...

Apparently, this is number one in the midweeks.

the first song on this sounds like 'take the skinheads bowling'

take the skinheads bowling is an excellent song.

what's difficult to accept is the dependence on falsetto and echo, at times both on the same song.

the second half of River Anacostia is like wow

first PJH album where the male backing vox have been a highlight

Apparently, this is number one in the midweeks.

Polly Jean: How many copies got returned on Monday?
Chorus: I heard it was 28,000

this record is good

first PJH album where the male backing vox have been a highlight

Rob Ellis begs to differ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYIAy4uF3UI

Polly Jean: How many copies got returned on Monday?
Chorus: I heard it was 28,000

― Jeff W, Tuesday, April 19, 2016

lol at this

This list stinks:
http://www.stereogum.com/1872593/pj-harvey-albums-from-worst-to-best/franchises/counting-down/

Might as well have written 'I like noisy guitars' and left it at that.

I might rate White Chalk and 4TD higher but: "I like guitars" isn't the thing with ITD? at 2.

nah I like the list fine because ITD? is so high

Yeah, White Chalk's quite high, too. "I like noisy guitars" doens't seem like the narrative there.

ILM is the only place I've seen that gives a damn for WC and ISD.

hooray for ilm i guess

Counterpoint: get the hint, ILM!