Flak Magazine: PJ Harvey's Uh Huh Her, 02.09.05

In context, it was a wrenching couplet, at once vulnerable and outsider-defiant. And incredulous, too — just one loud-mouthed girl! But the thing we weren't ever told about loud-mouthed girls is that once you accept them, you must then take onboard the entire parcel and package and never, ever complain, even in hindsight. That's the secret rule. And Polly Harvey is a loud-mouthed girl, for sure. Always has been, even when she's whispering.

Now, listen to the title Uh Huh Her. Could be the sound of someone puking. Or laughing. Or grunting with lustful abandon. Could be the sound of nonchalance, a verbal shrug, or a dawning affirmation. A dismissal. An Elvis sneer. A dance-floor testament to (serial?) bacchanalia ("that's the way [uh huh uh huh] I like it"). A cleared throat and a hearty hawk and spit. A gypsy hip swivel. A hurl interrupted. It's really the first PJ Harvey title to go beyond mere ambiguity into complete impenetrability. But that's all right, because we have the entire 15-year discography to help us contextualize it. Right?

Right. Given her longevity, her consistency, it must be fast approaching (uh oh) That Time™ — the time to place Harvey's body of work into some kind of context. Reverse-chronologically, if Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea flowed movie-like, that most studio-linear and lush of six-string narratives, then 1998's Is This Desire? resembled a subdued, submersed short-story collection. Similarly, if To Bring You My Love was mid-'90s dark cabaret, and Rid of Me (or better yet, 4-Track Demos) was a hoarse and rudimentary poetry slam, then Dry was grimy street theater, a split-universe grunge-blues of its time. In this way, Uh Huh Her draws sparingly on all of the above, its esoteric monochrome snapshots merely glancing (all retro flashcubes and shutter drive whirs) off the suggestive depths of its forebears.

*Click* Lips tasting of poison, "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth" lurches unapologetically into frame, a familiar swamp-stomp buzz saw boor expecting to straddle a simpering victim, perhaps, but encountering a weary pinch-faced scold instead: "Wash it out/ Wash it out/ Wash it out," she admonishes his bad mouth. The result: a creepy simmering standoff.

*Whir* "Shame" is an over-exposed moment of comfortless clarity amid dark ruminations: "Shame is the shadow of love." Light should never have been allowed amid such vulnerability, but now it's too late, we might as well enjoy the pretty squiggles made by these trapped, blind worms. Or marvel at the subliminal Latin burble of guitars, the wheeze of an accordion and the octave-scaling lament of voices circling like crows over a charnel house.

*Snap* "Oh love, you were/ a sickly child." Thus opens "The Desperate Kingdom of Love," as it gently sways on a cherub's breath of acoustic guitar, going nowhere, until...

*Pop* Seagulls cry, and "The Darker Days of Me and Him" arrives on a dubious promise of lessons reluctantly learned yet so plaintively understated and nylon-string melodic that it's not only possible but easy to imagine the eventual achievement of some happier resolution via such unobtrusive beauty.

Quick, pull out the negatives. Sure, black can be white, loud can be quiet, and vice versa (the skeletal outrage of "Who the Fuck?," for instance), but what we mostly get here are shades of ambivalent gray, encapsulated by the candid immediacy of "I'm not trying to cause a fuss/ I just want to make my own fuck-ups/ I'm not trying to break your heart/ I'm just trying not to fall apart" ("Pocket Knife"), blurred sketches rubbing against uncertain gestures.

Uh Huh Her is a loud-mouthed whisper, a stealth fighter — all faceted pen-and-ink angles with little shine, enamored of night, minimal and perhaps willfully avoiding the bright industry (boys club?) radar that brought its more garish predecessor a Mercury Prize in 2001.

Whether we use the raw blues filter or the art-rock lens, the authenticity meter or the irony barometer, we keep crashing against the wild and salty reefs that are PJ Harvey, all attempts at measurement limited at best. Rid of Me may well have been a guttural uterine roar, while To Bring You My Love draped sheets of (scraped deep) sugar-dashed sandpaper over all that squirmy velvet conflict. Is This Desire? was largely surface-tentative while plumbing delicious crypto-sapphic depths, and the critically acclaimed yet overly satisfied Stories... displayed both the fleeting pink of premature engorgement and the easy rose glow of fugitive fulfillment. Uh Huh Her is different. It doesn't display an overall stance or pose. It borrows from everything past while sounding utterly now; the now of regret and vengeance, of failure and dashed hope; the now of wisdom and worry, of dreams and desolation. Fuck, at its core, it sounds like both horniness and loneliness licking their own injuries and waging awkward war with their frantic host.

With, of course, no outright victor.

Which (uh huh duh) has always been the point. (Hasn't it? Yes. Yes it has.)

— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)