Although Polly Jean Harvey has by no means stooped to something so standard as an “answer record,” that’s basically what Is This Want? is. Its origins stem from an intense romantic entanglement with Nick Cave, which led to 1996 with an abrupt telephone name from Harvey. They’d been collectively solely a matter of months, and Cave was caught utterly off-guard. “I was so surprised I almost dropped my syringe,” he admitted years later.
The break-up first compelled him, then Harvey, to have interaction in a little bit of back-and-forth “he said, she said” through songs on their respective subsequent albums. Cave rapidly got here up with “West Country Girl,” “Green Eyes,” and “Black Hair,” and slotted them into the LP he was already making, which might turn into 1997’s The Boatman’s Name.
Harvey did issues somewhat otherwise. Moderately than emulating Cave’s literalism – although a tune known as “Tall, Skinny Australian Guy” would have been enjoyable – she heaped the ache and disappointment onto a procession of feminine characters: Elise, Catherine, Angelene, Pleasure, Leah, and Daybreak. Their tales are what form Is This Want?.
Launched in 1998 between her two largest weapons – the masterly To Carry You My Love and the Mercury Prize-winning Tales From The Metropolis, Tales From The Sea – it’s generally seen as a transitional file. For that motive, it’s typically been ignored, but it’s considered one of her most difficult and heartfelt albums – as acknowledged by a 1999 Grammy nomination for Finest Various Music Efficiency.
Want additionally earned Harvey her largest UK single, “A Perfect Day Elise.” Catchily loaded with ringing guitar and looped drums, it peaked at No.25 – sufficient to land her on Britain’s esteemed music present, Prime of the Pops, to carry out it reside. It’s instructive to check the stark TOTP efficiency to the digital dynamism of the recorded model: the vulnerability exuded on the small display screen means that she nonetheless hadn’t fairly achieved closure on the connection.
Studying between the traces
“I was doing a lot of emotional work [when she began studio sessions in 1997],” she shared on an interview disc that accompanied Want. Her self-reflection reached the purpose the place she needed to abandon the periods for some time: “I just wanted to stop, and start looking at my life as Polly, rather than my life as a songwriter.” By the point recording resumed in spring 1998, she’d devised a strategy to convey “life as Polly” with out the hazard of utterly exposing herself.
Little of Is This Want? is written within the first particular person; as a substitute, Harvey used brief tales by favourite authors for supply materials, discovering characters and conditions that mirrored her personal. For example, Pleasure Hopewell, the heroine of Flannery O’Connor’s Good Nation Folks, was reimagined because the betrayed-by-her-man protagonist of the observe “Joy,” and the lyric vibrates with anger: “Joy was her name, a life unwed/Thirty years old, never danced a step.” And God, is that mirrored by the music. Harvey’s bellowing anguish is matched in depth by a mattress of grinding digital noise, whereas two tracks in a while “No Girl So Sweet,” one other wronged O’Connor character, from the story The Life You Save Might Be Your Personal, units off a firestorm of guitar-synth distortion.
Adopting digital soundscapes
Together with the shockingly bleak “My Beautiful Leah,” which melds electro-brutalism and emotional despair, these are the harshest examples of the digital textures that outline the LP as an entire. Harvey had opened herself to the probabilities provided by machine-made sounds after singing on the Difficult observe “Broken Homes” (from the trip-hop pioneer’s 1998 album, Angels With Soiled Faces).
“Broken Homes” is pure, midnight-blue trip-hop, and a contact of that style made its approach onto Is This Want?, most notably on the dreamy, Portishead-inspired “Electric Light.” Additionally dreamy in their very own approach are “The Wind” and “Catherine,” written as a pair to honor the martyred St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of single ladies. A 14th century chapel in her title nonetheless stands on a hill in Dorset, close to Harvey’s birthplace, and the whispering loneliness of “The Wind” exactly captures the chapel’s isolation, and the torment of Catherine’s ideas as she awaits execution by the emperor Maxentius (“She dreamt of children’s voices/And torture on the wheel”). “Catherine,” in the meantime, is about to a percussive pulse that seems like a languidly beating coronary heart.
The 2 tracks are deeply shivery, however darkest of all is “My Beautiful Leah.” It’s so grim that when Harvey listened again to it she thought, “This is enough! No more of this! I don’t want to be like this. I knew I needed to get help,” she informed The Guardian the next 12 months.
A turning level
“Leah” proved a turning level. She started remedy whereas persevering with to work on the file, and her rising understanding of herself crept onto Is This Want?. She composed on a keyboard relatively than her common guitar, which affected her course of: hunched over a small transportable keyboard, she discovered herself writing “more thoughtfully.”
If her singing sounds completely different – purer, maybe – it’s as a result of, as a substitute of constructing demos of each music at dwelling, then re-recording the vocals within the studio, she transferred all of the four-track demos onto a multi-track recorder and used the unique vocals on the ultimate variations. The demos for all 12 tracks have simply been issued for the primary time as a standalone LP, Is This Want? – Demos.
Harvey has stated she finds Want each troublesome to take heed to and a supply of nice satisfaction. Referring to its forged of identity-masking characters, she informed the NME, “Whatever I’ve written all comes from inside me and my experience. Whether I write about that in another person’s name or my own, there’s a lot of me in there. Because I finally feel comfortable saying ‘I am Polly.’” Greater than 20 years later, it stands because the file that set Polly free from emotional bondage.
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