My Review: PJ Harvey - Dry

 PJ Harvey - Dry

‘Truth has the power of a God’

Monia Moroni

God is a woman, she spends her time winking at the fire, she judges, and she grazes the skin with mental orgasm, followed by physical contortions: her name is PJ Harvey and by trade she does that, as an evil activity, as a scientist, as a raving madwoman who makes self-analysis the starter for the analysis of her surroundings. Wild, raw, untamed, young, with no millennia to tire her breath, she wanders into the territory of notes, the only primordial medium through which she can galvanise rights, file down and bury abuses, and continually displace all opposition. The Dorset girl has entered like lightning into the mind of a madman: making visible that truth which no one wants to utter, with an unearthly slingshot she takes the breath of those who kneel before her. It is balanced chaos, studied, by means of the mask she wears over her white body, lifting her skirts, uncovering her small breasts, and she will do so for a few more years, but behind it all there is a superfine intellect, a wit, a sabre as heavy as the truths that abound in a race that, filled with darkness and blood, rents, steals, consumes dreams and shreds them in the fantasy of a reality incapable of opposing it.

Small in stature, it writes misfortunes as big as the sky's waterfalls, it accelerates, it scratches with a voice that is the only miracle that can seduce and condemn. She asserts, she drags, she bends to pick up the glass and then sticks it down her throat. 

There is no debut for someone who has been familiar with sin, with ostentation, with convulsion, refusing conversion since childhood. Straight, rigid, she strips away the vices and throws them into the sea of her writing. She intuits that time has an arrow to freeze, a radioactive principle full of poison, and that it is called the early nineties, where everything wants to be a resource, rediscovered and sunk, like a blind man who walks to hear voices. And her comes, pierces and drives away the comfort of those that, in the late eighties, tasted like expired honey.

Poisonous and pungent, her  voice is nothing compared to her lyrics, real diamonds that dazzle but create continuous repulsive jets. She challenges, wins and insists, with eleven devices that fluctuate in rhythm but are often nails on the cross of the lie. And the first consists in the musical choice of delving into the black heart of the United States, she English, displacing all expectations and dressing up with unsuspected remoteness, to surround the new American musical expressions, from folk blues, to grunge, to dive into alt-rock for a few brief moments, but always being hung up on the rhythm changes, the stinging guitars and the patience-testing vocals, ending up winning again.

Dry is apparently an album that needs four producers (Head, Vernon, Harvey, Ellis) because, inevitably, the material to be managed was paralysing the walls of the recording studio and discipline (another Goddess she destroyed at the base) had to somehow bring the 23-year-old Englishwoman to her senses. And here we are in an earthquake that goes from the sea to the earth, to the sky, with sharp excursions that prevent the audience from feeling at ease, giving them neurotic dances, unrestrained screams and a chase for lucidity that, once again, cannot be achieved.

Stories, tragedies, perversions, with an unbridled sexuality that has mystical, voluntary and precise reasons: the body, for Polly, is a pulsating rosary, with stages like an ordeal, where pleasure is a mistake. She uses nerves, smells, the stench of contortions, spasms, and faces the precipice of condemnation of a woman who suffers harassment and humiliation and who has, as her only resource, the violent greed of an unmasking pen. She brings knowledge to question through black and noisy fairy tales, inviting, rejecting, blessing the slavery of pleasure to probe the truth of well-being.

Inside all this incredible collective sea, sounds are the radar on which petals, dung, the stench of death before the sorrows that stick to its warm lips.

The rhythms, the rumblings, the sideways and unpleasant assaults in her ‘debut album’ are the vanity of a period that does not reckon with history: she takes care of it, with the artifice of a writing that seems to have been extracted from books in which the Middle Ages tell it all about itself. A fertile period, far from dark and bloody generous. PJ Harvey starts from there, from the contrasts, and she walks, blatantly, towards her time with the elegance of a feather in search of a crash. She seldom passes through the terrain of gentleness and when she does you have doubts, as if she needs a screen to hide her strains. 

It is a rare example of how a debut can strip away the era, the costumes, to advance in the chest like a falling in love that knows lurching and criticality.

The trio exhibits the zest of the lemon and projects the juice into the eyes of the heart with avalanches of shrill sounds, to make the melodic favour inaccessible.

Rude, indulgent, vain and insecure, this God in a skirt takes the third instrument she has learnt to play, harnesses it and throws rapidly rising sequences of notes: it's up to Robert Ellis' hallucinated drumming to find the world to tame the impetus, but he fails (and I'd say good riddance!) by becoming the prime accomplice of this jungle-moving world. As for Steve Vaughan, nothing to say: if a bass player has to command, make the sound sink into the stomach and become a tornado, he is the only one who can do it on this record, using his fingers like snakes in search of a reflection.

In a hypothetical room where sense seeks affirmation, Dry creates diversions, teases and illuminates the darkness of mind games. The abysses touch nature, dreams, doubts and, like a useless blush on days when dramas do not cover wounds, they emerge shifting the centre of gravity.

They are not single songs, but they can be a consequential path that in forty minutes create the bustle necessary to investigate how much this petite girl has the power to write about life from the side of jerks and counter-jerks to separate herself from herself: a new undeniable miracle

In 1991 one was waiting for the art of notes to move towards innovation, sorting, sifting and separating from ten years in which good and less good music stood on the same plane.

PJ didn't.

She just doesn't.

She creates a new hell, mocking, electric but acoustic in soul, as she sows love and gratitude for millennia of sounds and approaches but, if you think about it, she abandons her music to get out of a body that has an ungainly, feverish pentagram.

London is just a few steps away from being able to infect, mould and change her: no way, she, obstinate and powerful, dives in to flood the English capital with what was not there. And it was John Peel who wrote a memorable review in the Melody Maker, stating that in addition to the pleasant things, there was that something that left one stunned, amazed. He would call it in his legendary BBC broadcast and be the godfather of a run that would never stop. 

Now: how much does one cry in this album? How can one endure so much scouring without objecting? How to close the portcullis in front of songs that are firing squads?

Rust and glass paper, viruses, germs and a total fascination with undulating melancholy with scissors, in order to cut the umbilical cord that bound her to silence, inexpressiveness and having to play hide-and-seek with her ego, which is nothing if not a scorching feather.

When one thinks of concerts, festivals, small venues, one does so by imagining the gathering of bodies and souls in search of something. Polly arrives and sticks a new verb in your ears: a collective, grotesque orgy of persuasive winks, provocations, with the play of lights coming not from the headlights but from her songs, and we are at the third miracle

Pilot, like a voiceless sailor, amidst the flashes of landslides: just listen to the first two extracted singles and you realise that the comparison with Patti Smith is wrong and does not hold water. The English girl uses her emotional and mental wanderings to make words explode, to launch them and reset everything. The American songwriter, with her first three albums, knew how to stay at the centre of reason and quality, but she never had Polly's vehemence, exuberance, and ability to become, with only eleven compositions, a moving and murderous statue.

In this work, we can admire the extent to which the production creates a sonic abscess, a straitjacket that forces Polly to give all her spontaneity, fooling us, mocking the past and alerting the future that goblins, devils and spirits live inside her that certainly do not obey the etiquette of their time.

Dry is a deception, a manifesto, an uncomfortable mantra, which uses guitars to exorcise and debunk the melody, the bass to throw stones full of hessian sacks and the drums to bring the applause of ‘lesser gods’ from heaven...

In conclusion: in a hypothetical return of Dante, the circles would have to find a new one, upgrade and leave the wonderful Polly alone with her demons in lipstick...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

26th September 2024