Sharing the company of some of the most influential bands of the era, such as Pixies, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, in which artists who were once underground found themselves ascending to the highest levels of popular culture, fueled by the cultural and economic abundance and liberalizing zeitgeist of the 1990s, the music of PJ Harvey defined that decade like few others. Her first album, born of the disassembly of her role in the band Automatic Dlamini as a vocalist, guitarist and saxophonist, playing alongside frontman, John Parish, was picked up by influential British independent label, Too Pure. Having only released a single, which instantly had play thanks to John Peel, and press in the then widely-read weeklies NME and Melody Maker, and championed as being "charged with aggressive eroticism and rock fury. It careens from blues to goth to grunge, often in the space of a single song." in the pages of Rolling Stone, by the time of 1992's debut album "Dry", Polly Jean Harvey was almost instantly established as one of the major musical voices of the era. Her vertical cultural ascension continued that year with the signing to her longterm home, Island Records in 1992. Hot on the heels of the first of their Peel Sessions, the band traveled to Cannon Falls, Minnesota to record their next album with indie legend Steve Albini, founder of such bands as Big Black and Shellac. The producer of some of the most memorable albums of that decade passed unexpectedly earlier this year, and many of those who's art was enhanced by his singular style and artistic philosophy spoke with The Guardian, “PJ Harvey, Mogwai and More on Steve Albini”. The resulting album "Rid of Me", would be the band's major label debut in May 1993, and initiate a chain of releases created alongside producers Flood and John Parish, that would find themselves in placements within Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Records of All-Time. Few albums and artists so fully expressed the rough edged, hyperkinetic songwriting energy, hybridization of underground styles, and general zeitgeist of the era as "Dry", "Rid of Me", and 1995's "To Bring You My Love". It was indisputable at this point that Harvey was an artist of-and-from her time, and as The Guardian states in their profile, "PJ Harvey: A Singular Talent, She Dances to Her Own Tune".
By the end of the 1990s, a new phase, tempered by introspective moods, more spare arrangements, and a lush, refined production arrived with her first major duo album with John Parish "Dance Hall at Louse Point", and was then further polished to perfection on the 1998 high water mark, "Is this Desire?". Harvey expanded her musical vocabulary again on the multifaceted arrangements of "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea", the following dynamic, "Uh Huh Her". Their decades-long and fruitful collaboration and friendship, and the production of the albums that closed out the last years of the 1990s were illuminated in the pages of The Quietus, "A Woman, A Man: PJ Harvey And John Parish Interviewed". By the mid-2000's a clearly delineated shift toward a stripped down minimalist on albums like "White Chalk", and following in rapid succession, the second major collaboration with Parish, "A Woman A Man Walked By" of 2007 and 2009 respectively. This third stylistic phase of sorts initiated in the new millennium finds her songwriting more restrained and inward-looking. Yet it also expresses a newfound point of entry for her creative enterprises, “I Feel Like I’ve Just Begun”: An Interview with PJ Harvey", with expanded instrumentation outside of the rock lineup, as heard on 2011's "Let England Shake", and 2016's "The Hope Six Demolition Project". Departing from her longtime home of Island Records, with last year's "I Inside the Old Year Dying" on Partisan, Harvey has been exploring the historic and fictional lore of her home of Dorset. Set in a magical-realist outpost of the West Country, the singer-songwriter’s "Orlam" delights in Dorset dialect and folklore, and it is these themes of "Light and Dark, Ecstasy and Melancholy", that define her most recent body of work. The UK performances of this work have been described as a "Haunting Journey into a Fantastical Dorset World", expressing the album's "Disquieting Escape into the Wilds of Dorset". Yet PJ Harvey herself was motivated to further test the mettle of these materials and herself and band live, "‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on Doubt, Desire and Deepest, Darkest Dorset", with the undeniable results on full exhibition this fall in North America, and a date at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. Photo credit: Richard Isaac
