Swinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
You will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect.
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Posts Tagged: PJ Harvey
Album of the Week: Tei Shi’s Crawl Space
Tei Shi is Valerie Teicher—born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, raised between Bogota, Colombia, and Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in New York after graduating from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Her new album, Crawl Space, out now from Downtown Records, is her coming-of-age diary transposed into music. As we hear in the album opener, Teicher began writing […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #78: Conceived as a Playlist
Shadowbahn […] is among the most unusual, and most extreme, in a literary career that has often been marked by its unpredictability.
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Sound Takes: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
At once soothing and horrifying, it became for me the soundtrack of grief and hope for my wounded city and country.
...moreMusicians Reflect on Brexit
There has much apprehension following last week’s vote in favor of a British withdrawal from the EU. Some are predicting what the change will mean for the region’s music industry. PJ Harvey reacted to the vote by stopping mid-performance to read John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island.” Liam and Noel Gallagher, Bat for Lashes, Blood Orange, Lilly Allen, Disclosure, and […]
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Five Stages of Prince Fandom
You don’t need to know him personally, you say. You get the best of Prince through his music. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t.
...moreDC Politicians Unhappy with PJ Harvey
The singer’s “The Community of Hope,” off her upcoming album The Hope Six Demolition Project, has been out a week and is already drawing attention from unhappy politicians. The song was inspired by DC’s Ward 7 and explores urban blight—creating an association between the region and the phenomenon that the area’s politicians are none too happy […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Camille Rankine
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, history, and trying to be a writer every day.
...morePJ Harvey on Kosovo, Refugees, and Crisis
PJ Harvey has released another video from her upcoming album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, which will come out April 15th on Vagrant. The video for “The Wheel” was filmed in Kosovo and London, as NPR reports, and documents the singer’s work with her collaborator, Irish director Seamus Murphy, examining Europe’s recurring crises of war, […]
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Woman-Size: Female Image-Making and PJ Harvey
A raw video of a diminutive woman howling “I’m the king of the world!” and nearly eating the camera was a welcome assault on late-night TV. It’s why I stayed up on a school night.
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #10: “Satisfaction”
There was this thing that happened in the ’90s: a lot of women were making rock music. It seems simple to most of us here in the twenty-first century, but back then, it was apparently an extremely difficult concept to grasp, because every music magazine and radio station treated “rock music by women” as its […]
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #9: “The Last Living Rose”
In 2011, two decades after her debut, PJ Harvey released what might actually be her best album ever: Let England Shake. Recorded in a church in Dorset, LES takes as its subjects homeland and war.
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #8: “Who the Fuck?”
“Who the Fuck?” is an old-school Polly Jean temper tantrum with an acerbic guitar riff choked through cheap amps. Plus cussing.
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #7: “A Perfect Day Elise”
PJ Harvey’s fourth studio album includes not one but two songs based on J. D. Salinger stories.
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #6: “The Dancer”
If you’ve only heard one PJ Harvey song, it’s probably “Down by the Water” off her 1995 album To Bring You My Love. A runaway hit that broke the top 50 on UK and US music charts, it epitomized the unique aesthetic direction of third album, which Rolling Stone described as “a towering goth version […]
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #5: “This Mess We’re In”
Thom Yorke and PJ Harvey sit in New York and contemplate their doomed love and suffer, and it’s all terribly stylish and sexy. What really makes the song crackle, though, is the fact that neither one of them had sung this way about sex before—and haven’t really done so since.
...morePJ Harvey Tuesday #4: “When Under Ether”
By 2007, PJ Harvey had released six studio albums, which ran the gamut in style from explosive blues-punk to near-industrial electronica to soulful pop rock. To the surprise of all (and dismay of many), her seventh album, White Chalk, marked a dramatic departure from all that. Gone were the buzz-saw guitars and the androgynously low […]
...morePJ Harvey Tuesday #3: “Sheela-Na-Gig”
Let’s get right to it: What is a sheela-na-gig?
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #2: “Rid of Me”
“I very much wanted to write songs that shocked,” PJ Harvey recently told Spin about her early career. “All I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote ‘Rid of Me,’ I shocked myself.”
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PJ Harvey Tuesday #1: “Henry Lee”
Now that Nick Cave Mondays have drawn to a close, the obvious next step is PJ Harvey Tuesdays.
...moreRid of Me Turns 20
It may be hard to believe, but neither you nor your favorite ’90s albums are teenagers anymore. To celebrate the 20th (!) anniversary of PJ Harvey’s seminal sophomore effort Rid of Me, Spin talked to Harvey, her bandmates, and their legendary producer Steve Albini for an oral history of the record’s creation. A small preview: At that time, […]
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Nick Cave Monday #32: “West Country Girl”
What do you do when you think a girl is hot and you really want to get with her? You write her a song. Nick Cave did that for PJ Harvey and “West Country Girl” was released on “The Boatman’s Call” in 1997. Thus kindled the romance between Nick and Polly.
...moreOff the Page and Into the Microphone
From Novels to Notes is a new blog by journalist Johnny Garcia chronicling songs inspired by fiction or poems. It’s still getting started, but it looks promising: there are already two entries about PJ Harvey, and there are bound to be more once Garcia discovers those lines she cribbed from T. S. Eliot. What are […]
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