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P.J. Harvey - A Woman a Man Walked By
| Rollingstones |
| On 2007's White Chalk, Polly Harvey made some of the quietest and most riveting music of her career. That record's coiled menace returns on this second set with longtime collaborator John Parish. Her latest also finds her at her most gleefully deranged. Parish provides music, while Harvey recites, sings and mangles the lyrics. "Pig Will Not," a howling Captain Beefheart–style blues, features her barking (more English terrier than pit bull). But she's most animalistic on the title track, cornering a "woman/man" with "chicken–liver balls" and echoing the strap–on threat from her classic "50Ft Queenie." She's still not a girl to take home to Mama....full text |
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| Thequietus |
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PJ Harvey surprised many last year by bringing out an album so small in scale, so finnicky and chilly, that many critics saw it as a stubborn step back into dilemma by an artist who flourishes there. Though Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and Uh Huh Her have seen the majority of her commercial success, stylistically White Chalk saw her taking more risks than at any time since her first solo record, 1995's To Bring You My Love. Working principally on the piano, until then an unfamiliar instrument, Harvey's compositions became a specialist lens through which to view spectral characters and stories otherwise lost to view. Both To Bring You My Love and White Chalk were produced by John Parish, his approach a dextrous combination of flexibility and sureness of touch perhaps needed by such otherwise static and abhuman records. The release of A Woman A Man Walked By sees the pair's second collaboration with Parish in the songwriter's chair, the first being Dance Hall At Louse Point, the 1996 album into which Harvey retreated after the effort and exhaustion of To Bring You My Love. Louse Point found Harvey sending her narrators out to wander the sinister mazes of Parish's songs, an approach she clearly found liberating; her subsequent album, Is This Desire, contained some of her most accomplished, confident character writing to date, finally seeing off the biographical readings that had dominated critical response to her work until then....full text |
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| Guardian |
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raising candour of 1993's Rid of Me invited unwelcome speculation, she has made herself a moving target. With each record she sheds her skin - now banshee blues, now West Country gothic, now Radio 2 rock - while with each interview she disdains the concept of the artist as diarist. Listeners who detect a kernel of emotional truth in each new persona will have to draw their own conclusions. You might infer that the woman who sang of New York and new love on the Mercury-scooping Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea was in a happier headspace than the one who roamed, ghost-like, across the blighted moors and crags of White Chalk, but she couldn't possibly comment. In the press notes to A Woman a Man Walked By, her first record with multi-instrumentalist John Parish since 1996's Dance Hall at Louse Point, she frames the record as a project, a diversion, a lark - in other words, a minor work. So how come it's so unexpectedly captivating? This is a piecemeal work glued together by sheer, throat-grabbing charisma. The sly, sensual opener, Black Hearted Love ("When you cry out my name in rapture/ I volunteer my soul for murder"), may be her most robust rock song in years, but it soon surrenders to the racked mantra of Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen and the waltz-time mountain music of Leaving California. The chill mists of White Chalk cling to The Soldier, in which Harvey dreams of being a combatant who walks "on the faces of dead women". Such moments of eerie hush are ruptured by bursts of dissonant clamour. Pig Will Not finds Harvey woofing like a dog, while A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go displays the demonic mischief of Nick Cave: a balefully funny account of a man with "lily-livered balls" which vomits forth the lunatic threat, "I want your fucking ass."...full text |
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