Send "PJ Harvey " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Musicomh |
 If the Bank Of England had a pound for every time PJ Harvey has repeated that she doesn't like to repeat herself, there would be no fiscal crisis. It's become a bit of a running joke among her fans, but you've really got to hand it to the Dorset chameleon - somehow she always manages to confound expectations. While it seems that few people have spent the last 12 years longing for a follow-up to 1996's Harvey/Parish album Dance Hall At Louse Point, there's been a massive surge of interest surrounding this new collaborative effort. Described by Harvey as "quite a peculiar little record" way back in March 2008, it's only now that we can really start to grasp just how much of an understatement that was. In no uncertain terms, A Woman A Man Walked By is fucking weird. Lead single Black Hearted Love is a crabwise take on Harvey's most commercial output, skirting the blues-rock idiom she so boldly shied away from on 2007's White Chalk, but here the thrillingly abrasive guitar work is classic Parish. As with Dance Hall, it's he that provides A Woman A Man Walked By with its instrumental complexity while Harvey has crafted the lyrics and coaxed out each song's unique personality....full text |
| Allmusic |
| A Woman a Man Walked By arrived just a year and a half after PJ Harvey's equally difficult and brilliant White Chalk. That alone makes it notable, since the last time she released albums in such quick succession was the early to mid-'90s, around the same time of her last songwriting collaboration with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point. That album's unbridled experiments provided a sharp contrast to the subversive polish of its predecessor, To Bring You My Love; while A Woman a Man Walked By isn't quite as overt an about-face from White Chalk, the difference is still distinct. Here, Harvey and Parish (who played on and co-produced White Chalk) trade sublime, sustained eeriness for freewheeling vignettes that cover a wider range of sounds and moods than her music has in years. They begin with "Black Hearted Love," the equivalent of Dance Hall at Louse Point's "This Was My Veil" -- that is, the album's most accessible moment: guitar-heavy yet sleek, its riffs full of pregnant pauses as Harvey hones in on the one she wants, the song's sinister romance initially seems dangerously close to melodrama ("When you call out my name in rapture/I volunteer my soul for murder"), but she sings "you are my black-hearted love" so tenderly and knowingly that it transcends cliché. This immediacy just makes the swift twists and turns the rest of A Woman a Man Walked By takes even more striking. The wildly jangling acoustic guitar and breathless vocals of the following track, "Sixteen Fifteen Fourteen," make that clear right away, but despite its nervy intensity, the song -- and the rest of the album -- is remarkably direct. Similarly, Harvey's character studies are just as vivid as other artists' really real, from-the-soul lyrics, and she embodies them just as completely: on "The Soldier," she sings of "walking on the faces of dead women" with haunted fragility; on "Daniel," she's a mother so devastated by loss that she can only mention it by name at the last possible moment. A Woman a Man Walked By also boasts songs that rank among Harvey's most intimate and seemingly confessional. From its shimmering guitar and mournful flute to its carefully observed words ("you slept facing the wall"), "Passionless, Pointless" captures a dying romance with dreamy desolation, while "Cracks in the Canvas" closes the album with the beautifully simple yet open-ended admission "I'm looking for an answer, me and a million others."...full text |
| Boston |
| PJ Harvey and John Parish A Woman, a Man Walked By Island ESSENTIAL "A Woman, A Man Walked By" Longtime collaborators Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish make for strange bedfellows. She's the indie rock firebrand beloved for her singular vision since the early 1990s; he's her mentor, more known for his behind-the-scenes work as a producer than for his own albums. The music they make together retains the essence of their individual talents, yet it sounds like the work of a wholly different band. Harvey sings and writes the lyrics, while Parish helms the production and composes the music and arrangements. On "A Woman, A Man Walked By," they create a world both beautiful and depraved, an unhinged record heavy on heartache and bristling with aggression. And that's just the opening song, "Black Hearted Love," where Harvey's languid voice floats above the crash and clang of Parish's electric-guitar squall....full text |
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