"Uh Huh Her." Thoughts on the new PJ Harvey?

I'm liking "The Darker Days of Me and Him."

guessing it's a joke. consider someone like myself asking a record store clerk about pj's new album.

Really liking "Mr. Badmouth" thus far, very Dry/Rid of Me-sounding. I hope the rest of it is like this, instead of her last couple.

Which syllable to stress? The second?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

"Uh Huh Her" is such a great album title! Yr nuts!

better album titles for the new pj harvey album:
My Heart's In The Highlands
Brian Blessed
20 Line-Dancin' Favourites
Homiez Erect Select

This is OTM. I was actually thinking just the other day about how my enjoyment of PJ Harvey is kind of an anomaly in some ways, in that I don't think I could identify a common element between her music and "stuff I ordinarily like" (which is, admittedly, a wide category).

xpost: i always found kim gordon songs better on paper than in the ear.

Before it was leaked, a few loops of the songs were leaked, so maybe that's what some of you are hearing.

I don't like "Cat on the Wall."

Heroin, no doubt. It's interesting that, while pop stars are often 'addicted to painkillers', rock stars resort to heroin. This 'pain killer' actually supplies them with the suffering their wealth forbids them, and is therefore a direct route to authenticity and the blues credibility the genre demands. Heroin = the white man's burden.

Rock is rebellious, yet like many 'rebels' it rebels against the wrong things, against the things it's told to.

For example, every society has its own compromise between freedom and safety -- a delicately-poised, highly social model.

In our highly capitalist society, we smash traditional social relations, replacing them with a 'lonely crowd' of atomised, irresponsible consumer-individuals in single-dweller units, bingeing on food, drugs, cigarettes, consumer items to fill a perceived inner void.

In the case of nicotine this is a self-imposed void and the void is part of the attraction- an insufficiency of the drug provides a craving every bit as essentially soul-satisfying as the fix that succeeds it.

Without pain, no joy. Without tension no release. Without suffering ...?

Tobacco is a product that kills, smokers enter a death-pact with a product which exemplifies a somewhat self-pitying and destructive mass market version of heroin. Yet cigarrette companies are huge multi-nationals, with global distribution, lobby groups, r&d, design depts that tailor the packets to your live-fast-die-young / fuck-you attittood.
Fat middle aged men with condos and mistresses, selfish, aggressive, egocentric assholes.

Now, everything has really got mixed up.

i do like discussing these sort of things:

In our highly capitalist society, we smash traditional social relations, replacing them with a 'lonely crowd' of atomised, irresponsible consumer-individuals in single-dweller units, bingeing on food, drugs, cigarettes, consumer items to fill a perceived inner void.

this is a good thing! a very good thing! if it sounds like an existential crisis, excellent! that's where humanity's at! we need to figure out ways out of repressive social relations, and damaging relations to poorer nations and the people there. a modern middle class white is faced with a stark choice - do i live my life and socialize, and get a family and career and listen to happy dance music, or do i look for something meaningful? the existential crisis is quite simply the search for god or meaning or depth or truth. it's "trainspotting", it's how the human race progresses, by evolving. if no-one evolves, what we end up with is a bunch of clever rich people who destroy the planet.

to believe that rock music, guitar music, is moribund - what rubbish! the sound of a raw guitar tone - for example, a bunch of teens on stage in a bar playing a raunchy cover of little richard or a sonic youth-influenced yet half-assed original - it's a good thing, because it's exciting. a raw guitar sound is like a thick slab of rich color in a painting.

That's an interesting comparison, because the equivalent of 'rockism' in the art world is the belief that painting is 'the real thing', a direct expression of the painter's emotions, 'timeless', and so on, whereas other forms of art like video art, conceptual art, installation, performance etc are trendy will-o-the-wisps, fly-by-nights, etc. Were you tempted to say 'a raw guitar sound is like a nice slowly-swinging video camera in a Vito Acconci single-channel video work'? You probably weren't.

I'm tempted to shout at PJ Harvey, in a similar spirit: 'You rock in your work, don't you? Rock, rock, rock!' For me, to rock and to be stuck are the same thing. To rock is to have chosen the past over the future. It's to be stuck in a dry place without inspiration. However, in Britain the music world is a lot more conservative and backward-looking than the art world. The Mercury Prize rewards Rockism in a way the Turner Prize will never reward Stuckism. In the music world, I'm the crank stuck outside the Tate railings protesting.

And if you're looking to crack the surface of what turns this girl named Polly Jean into the songs, sounds and ever-morphing images of PJ Harvey -- the things that may prove to be powerfully influential over her -- you won't find too many people she considers contemporaries.

“I do try and listen to what's happening in contemporary music, but there is very little that I get excited about,” she admits, without a hint of regret or an apologetic sigh -- it's just the way it is, as far as she's concerned. “I do tend to listen to older music rather than newer music. Having said that, a band that I always follow is a band called The Fall, from England. I do find that he's one of my favorite contemporary songwriters -- Mark E. Smith -- and their albums, the last run of them, the last three or four, have really been incredible. And they put out a couple of records a year, so it's always exciting to me that they're releasing new stuff. Other than them, there's very little I've been listening too lately.”

I'm the crank stuck outside the Tate railings protesting

That would make you stuck!

I'm fit and working again-ah!

Is that why all his teeth fell out?

"There won't be any future without rock" sounds equally ridiculuos as apodictic statement but is probably closer to the truth. People will always connect to the primal feelings expressed in rock. Rock has been there for 50 years or so (not counting the blues past)and has been declared dead hundreds of times. Whereas something newish like laptop music may well cease to exist tomorrow as other recent trends like techno already have more or less. They simply don't have the power and the urgency of rock. Playing identity games is so 1960s. On the long run people get bored with it and want the real thing. Andy Warhol was the future in the 60s but he is dead now.

EITHER

[b]Same Shit Different Arsehole[/b]

this is the pop music business model obviously. you give 'em the same catchy pap fronted by an ever-changing conveyor belt of young faces. witness cover version recyling, the stock in trade of breaking a new pop 'artiste'.

[b]Same Arsehole Different Shit[/b]

this is a more radiohead/U2 type of schtick. you've got to deliver the goods that your core fanbase want, at the same time as only [i]cosmetically[/i] altering what you really do. witness Achtung Baby, Joshua Tree with a few knobs on, sold to joe P as the new ironic post-modern U2 with artwork to match. actually that's unfair to radiohead, they have made actual musical changes over their lifespan.

so back to Peej. i must out myself right now as a HUGE fan, but i feel she's kinda treading water on this one. i can't listen to ITD front to back, but on some of those tracks the phasers are clearly set to 'Mindblowing' (Sky Lit Up, No Girl So Sweet etc). UHH sounds like a retread of old stuff but done in a slightly more palatable fashion. i dunno, i'm not feeling it. i expect a certain amount of [i]risk[/i] out of her - hell, Stories was so unexpectedly caution-to-the-wind melodic and poppy that it knocked me clean off my feet. no, it isn't her 'best' work, but you could still feel the decisions and the price it exacted from her. my bitching is testament to how high she's set the bar on previous outings.

on the plus side, the seagulls send me off into a deep and blissful sleep.

sorry for being a dreary pedant.

And we all know who this is, don't we Momusmatix?

Bobby Gillespie once said, in a rockist justification of his relevance despite being over 40, 'The young can't get it up like us and Iggy can'. So I'd paraphrase that and say 'The living can't get it up like Andy Warhol and Guy Debord can'.

by the way the blonde redhead album was a major disappointment imo. almost mainstream sounding. like a bland pop album.

This thread is bonkers. But anyway, I've listened to this a few times over the weekend and it's very, very god, isn't it?

very god? Begotten not created?

haha, yes and yes!

Hmmm. Damn my cold fingers.

i love this album.

"I have no time for anal love" still cracks me up