If you have been wanting to get into PJ Harvey, and are not into anything too hard or dark and want something more accessible, then you can’t go wrong with her fifth album, “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, but I do emphasize, to love PJ Harvey’s music, you accept it as a whole. Each album has a different sound with tracks which have a little of something in terms of musical style from a previous album.”Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” is recommended.
Click here to purchase PJ Harvey’s “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” on Amazon
ARTIST: PJ Harvey
ALBUM: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
DURATION: 12 Songs (48 Minutes)
YEAR OF RELEASE: October 24, 2000
1 Big Exit
2 Good Fortune
3 A Place Called Home
4 One Line
5 Beautiful Feeling
6 The Whores Hustle and The Hustlers Whore
7 This Mess We’re In
8 You Said Something
9 Kamikaze
10 This Is Love
11 Horses In My Dreams
12 We Float
As a person who listens to a lot of PJ Harvey, look at her career which started in 1998 up to her last studio album “The Hope Six Demolition Project” released back in 2016, one thing that one should know about the artist is that one should never expect each album to sound like the last.
In fact, PJ Harvey is such a diverse and talented music artist, she singes, writes her own music, plays her own music and she does her own thing.
Whether or not the label execs like it, PJ Harvey is one of those music artists that has accomplished so much in her career and that she has always been rebellious and carefree that it makes her one of the more exciting music artists to follow and listen to, because with each album, you never know what you are going to get.
Some people love that about her, some people get fed up because they still want a version of PJ Harvey that they loved with “Rid of Me” or “To Bring You My Love”.
But decades have passed that one should know by now, if you want to enjoy PJ Harvey, just kick back and listen to what she has to deliver and be entertained. Don’t compare, just enjoy.
That’s the best way I can tell friends and other music listeners curious about Polly Jean Harvey.
For those not familiar with PJ Harvey, the singer/songwriter/musician grew up listening to blues, Captain Beefheart and Bob Dylan courtesy of her music loving parents who arranged music get-togethers and small gigs.
In 1988, she was a member of the band Automatic Diamini and in 1991, she left the band to form her own band with members Rob Ellis and Ian Oliver and worked closely with musician and producer, John Parish. In fact, Parish’s girlfriend at the time was photographer Maria Mochnacz, who took many photos of PJ Harvey for her albums used for her album covers and also directed most of Harvey’s music videos.
While Harvey is not an artist who goes after the #1 position on music charts, her best selling album in the ’90s was her second album, “Rid of Me” (1993) which reached no. 3 on the UK music charts (which she would later reach no. 1 in 2016 with her album “The Hope Six Demolition Project”.
And “Rolling Stone” magazine has her three albums, “Rid of Me”, “To Bring You My Love” and “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” on their “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
The album I will be reviewing is her fifth album, “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” (2000) and the while it’s been said the theme is Harvey’s love for New York City. Harvey has said that the songs featured on the album were completed back in London.
The album would feature song collaborations with Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke for “Beautiful Feeling” and “The Mess We’re In”. Yorke also did the backup vocals and keyboard for the songs “One Line”.
Harvey said she wanted to make the album songs more melodic and fuller and wanted the songs to be more beautiful and less dark.
Harvey said to the publication “Q” in 2001, “I wanted everything to sound as beautiful as possible. Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love – where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds – Stories From The City… was the reaction. I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work.”
And so, many would consider the album “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” her most accessible album and many compared the artist to Patti Smith.
Of course, the album became successful but not wanting to be pigeonholed by the success of the album, in 2004, Harvey did the complete opposite with her album “Uh Huh Her”. Telling “Time Out” Magazine that she “wanted to get back to the earthy, rootsy, more dirty side of things”.
But going back to the popular “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, the album received critical acclaim, the production is slicker and for the most part, many loved it.
In fact, it won a Mercury Prize in 2001 and is considered one of her best works.
On 2000, I will tell you that I liked it a lot, but I didn’t love it and at the time, I even pondered, “I guess people prefer a slicker production for PJ Harvey, everyone is going crazy for this album”.
Part of the reason is because I felt “Dry”, “Rid of Me”, “To Bring You My Love” were albums I loved for it’s edge. Harvey’s screaming, heavy hitting power chords and a sort of darkness and melancholy that gripped me. I felt the music of her past, I gravitated to.
This album, I enjoyed, but it was a bit different to what I was used to listening to.
And listening to it in 2022, and hearing PJ Harvey create diverse music in later years with “Let England Shake” and “The Hope Six Demolition”, the two being a major change in musical direction, I enjoyed both.
I was hoping by listening to “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” and maybe have a change of heart. But my feelings then, are the same feelings I have now.
With “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, I felt the songs were something you can listen to on the radio and also watch on MTV and then someone telling you they loved PJ Harvey because of the music on the album and then thinking to myself, “just wait until the next album” and let’s see if you still remain a PJ Harvey fan. And sure enough, the attention and the critical acclaim was something she escaped from with her next album “Uh Huh Her” especially with the track “Who the Fuck?” four years later. Which left me grinning and wanting to hold my arms open for PJ Harvey and say, “welcome back”.
But then again, I’m a person who doesn’t like seeing my favorite artists becoming “radio friendly”. I grew up with the KROQ 106.7 and listening to music in Los Angeles that no other radio station played back in the ’80s and ’90s.
And when Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure became “radio friendly”, I had mixed feelings about it.
The same with PJ Harvey and “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”. I don’t want to call it “playing safe” because we know already that PJ Harvey does what she wants and the goal of this album was creating something “beautiful” and less dark.
There was glimpses that Harvey was slowly getting away from those darker songs and the heavy hitting, frenetic guitars and percussion as evidenced in the 1998 album “Is this Desire?”. An album that I did enjoy, but even John Parrish would say, that because the record company wanted to put their creative input and Harvey gave in, as she was having health issues at the time. But that album produced songs I truly loved such as “Angelene” and “No Girl So Sweet”.
So, with “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, I remember hearing the first track. Songs like “Big Exit” were to my liking because that’s a bit of classic PJ Harvey in there.
But then came the next three songs and they were very good songs, but the production seemed quite slick and polished. I understood that Harvey was getting away from the dark and gritty music but I admit that I worried.
I worried that she would be compared to Chrissie Hynde and even Patti Smith. Two music legends that I listen to, especially Hynde’s earlier work with The Pretenders and both women were part of that punk movement and post-punk movement in the mid to late ’70s.
While her singles off the album such as “Good Fortune”, “A Place Called Home” and “This is Love” are the type of music you would catch on MTV or your alternative rock station. The music is very cool, catchy and upbeat and lyrics are much more positive. While “This is Love” was on constant replay during my college commutes at the time.
And if anything, if there was an album that would attract the MTV and radio listening crowd (remember this album was released in 2000), this album would be it. And it was successful in doing just that.
For me, it was as mentioned similar to the music that fans of Patti Smith and even Chrissie Hynde could love (and both artists I do enjoy their music a lot).
But the more I listened to this album, the more I wanted to listen to “Rid of Me”, “50ft Queenie”, “Snake” and hear those heavy hitting guitars and percussion.
Interesting enough that the songs that I gravitated to are songs such as “Big Exit”, “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” and “Kamikaze”. And I also enjoyed the collaboration with Thom Yorke for “This Mess We’re In” and the music featured in “We Float”.
For the most part, I did enjoy “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” but I do recommend for one to check out the demos for this album as featured in “Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea – Demos” which is more of a different vibe. In fact, some of the demos are much better than the final versions.
So, in a way, I wish this was issued as a deluxe edition, so you can get both. But you can purchase the demos of this album as a standalone.
But if you have been wanting to get into PJ Harvey, and are not into anything too hard or dark and want something more accessible, then you can’t go wrong with her fifth album, “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, but I do emphasize, to love PJ Harvey’s music, you accept it as a whole. Each album has a different sound with tracks which have a little of something in terms of musical style from a previous album.
“Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” is recommended.
Click here to purchase PJ Harvey’s “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea” on Amazon
