It’s one within the morning, someday in 1999, and Polly Harvey and her man are on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Swooning over the Manhattan skyline throughout the river, she sings, “I see five bridges, the Empire State Building/And you said something that I’ve never forgotten.”
Make no mistake, Tales From the Metropolis, Tales From the Sea is PJ Harvey’s wild-love-in-New York report. That tune, “You Said Something,” is one in all many on the 2000 LP that bubble over with adoration for a major different, with the town as its backdrop. For the primary time on a PJ Harvey album, Polly’s glasses had been rose-tinted and her temper frisky; not solely that, she channeled her vitality away from polarizing rawness, and into big-chorus arena-rock.
Area-rock? New York? Her artistry has at all times taken her to sudden nooks, however who might have foreseen PJ Harvey going radio-friendly? And who might have pictured this product of rural Dorset turning right into a Manhattan hipster and writing a report about it? Simply verify the album cowl: carrying shades at night time, she’s crossing a neon-lit downtown avenue, cool as Patti Smith.
But it was nonetheless Harvey – simply not because the world knew her. And this completely different model of her received the 2001 Mercury Music Prize, snagged two Grammy nominations, and offered 1 million copies internationally. However how did it occur?
Having made two of her most emotionally taxing albums in To Convey You My Love (1995) and Is This Want? (1998), Harvey was adamant that her subsequent album can be stuffed with magnificence and light-weight. As she started to think about Want?‘s follow-up. she spent a month in New York, appearing within the Hal Hartley movie The E-book Of Life. The town struck her as the right place to put in writing, and she or he returned for an extended spell in 1999. The celebrities aligned: New York “energized” her, she was newly in love and the songs flowed.
Because the ‘Sea’ half of the title implies, it wasn’t fully composed in “the city;” some songs had been written in her native Dorset, whereas others had been impressed by a tenting journey within the California wilderness. Digging deeper, an intriguing back-story emerges. The chilly digital outing Is This Want? (written within the aftershock of an intense relationship with Nick Cave) had been so desolate that mates had persuaded her to enter remedy. She got here to grasp that low shallowness had hindered her personally and as an artist, and when she started to compose the subsequent report, one consideration was paramount: that it not sound something like Want?.
“Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on ‘Is This Desire?’ and ‘To Bring You My Love,’ where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds, ‘Stories From The City’ was the reaction,” she advised Q journal in 2001. “I thought, ‘No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody.’” Recording within the English countryside close to Milton Keynes with longtime associates Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey, she achieved it.
As an alternative of repelling mainstream listeners with abrasiveness, Tales drew them in with fullness and vibrancy – however delivered as solely PJ Harvey might. The feverish voice and the lyrics’ erotic neediness on the rumbling guitar-rocker “This Is Love” had been totally Harvey. So was her alternative of visitor vocalist on three tracks: Thom Yorke, maybe the one British male in a position to ship her lyrics as shatteringly as she does herself.
His presence meant that listeners obtained two indie-rock gods for the value of 1, and their keening duet on “This Mess We’re In” can be outstanding even when it didn’t characteristic Yorke singing essentially the most un-Yorkean line conceivable: “Night and day, I dream of making love to you now, baby.”
“I’d long time been an admirer of his voice – a very unusual and beautiful voice he has,” Harvey defined in a 2000 interview. “So I wrote this song with him in mind and sent it to him along with the two other songs he sings backing vocals on, ‘One Line’ and ‘Beautiful Feeling.’”
If we’re being choosy, nevertheless, “absolute beauty” often stretches it a bit of. Not each monitor is as buoyant as “You Said Something” or the equally joyous “Good Fortune,” the place she jauntily sings about getting down in Chinatown and sounds remarkably like a hip-swinging Chrissie Hynde.
Some songs are downright frazzled, together with the opener, “Big Exit,” a clawing, twisting factor that revisits the grungy angst of 1993’s Rid Of Me, however with reverb. It’s important to admire the braveness she confirmed in making it the report’s first monitor, as a result of it forces the listener to image Polly shaken to the core by a worry which will or will not be groundless (“I see danger come/I want a pistol, I want a gun/I’m scared, baby/I wanna run.”). The penultimate “Horses In My Dreams” can also be powerful – the central acoustic guitar riff is slowed to a limp strum, and Harvey’s vocal rasps and grinds.
Primarily, nevertheless, Tales skewed towards actual happiness. Even the demo variations – now accessible on vinyl as Tales From The Metropolis, Tales From The Sea – Demos – have a skip of their step.
Considered one of her definitive qualities as a musician is that Harvey isn’t static. Reflecting on Tales from The Metropolis, Tales From The Sea in 2008, she mentioned, “I wanted to try writing lots of perfect pop songs.” Having achieved that in spades, she’s at all times been too stressed (and modest) to bask within the glory of it. However the remainder of us can. Whereas we’re at it, we are able to additionally respect the truth that it was the primary album by a feminine solo artist to win the Mercury Prize: Polly’s excellent pop report wasn’t simply nice, it was a historical past maker.
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