Judy Berman 5小时前
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit PJ Harvey’s searing and monumental album from 1993.

After the tense summer tour that had followed Rid of Me’s spring release, she had split with her bandmates, drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, in the trio they’d called PJ Harvey. So Polly appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” accompanied only by her guitar. From a technical standpoint, it wasn’t a stellar performance. On the album and in concert, Ellis had taken over the haunting falsetto backing vocals: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/Lick my legs of desire.” Even the demo was mixed to layer Harvey’s throaty, menacing leads over her high-pitched chant.

But on Leno’s stage, she played both overlapping parts at once, and the effect was hair-raising. Her falsetto sounded involuntary and unnaturally girlish, a genderless being’s impression of women, as though the song of violent obsession had awakened some histrionic alternate personality within Harvey. She closed by taking her hand off the strings, repeating the “Lick my legs” chant a cappella smiling more to herself than to the audience.

Leno pronounced her performance “very nice,” with all the forced enthusiasm of a high-school English teacher who’d asked the quiet girl to read her poem aloud. In the short interview that followed, he raised what must have seemed like an innocuous topic: Harvey’s rural roots on a sheep farm in Dorset. “So you still go back and do the chores?” Leno wanted to know. She responded with a list of tasks that included castrating sheep. “For the male lambs that you don’t want to become rams, you have to ring their testicles with a rubber band,” Harvey explained, as frank as any lifelong farmer would be. “And after about two weeks, they drop off.” The crowd roared as though she’d made a joke.

If he’d been following her career in the UK music press over the past two years, Leno might have asked Polly about the controversy that had dogged her in her home country, where Rid of Me had reached No. 3 on the pop charts. The British weeklies lost their minds about every new song her band put out—and more so about every image of Harvey that accompanied them. She had appeared naked from the waist up, her back to the camera, on the cover of NME in 1992, offending the delicate (and hypocritical sensibilities of Melody Maker. Even the cover of Rid of Me, Maria Mochnacz’s photo of the artist in the bath, which exposed only her head, shoulders, and a shock of wet hair in whip-like motion, caused an outcry.

By fall of 1993, rubberneckers had moved on to rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown while writing Rid of Me. A SKY magazine profile from that period followed a typical formula: Reporter Simon Witter contrasted Harvey’s “suave, demure, elegant, womanly” mien with her “howling banshee music” and recounted confronting her with his insight that “while her ensemble says ‘Look at me!,’ its [all-black] color scheme [was] the classic camouflage of fatties and fence-sitters.” Then he shifted into sympathetic mode, asking about the rough patch she preferred not to call a breakdown, which took her from London to the seaside room in her home county where she recorded the Rid of Me demos. She attributed the dark period to the end of her first real romance, an unpleasant experience at the Reading Festival, and the constant flood of feedback from the industry, fans, and—in a hint Witter must have politely ignored—the media.

Her Leno appearance feels like a truer representation of who she was at the time than any contemporaneous profile. Certain young musicians—mostly innovators with strong points of view who don’t check all the straight, white, male boxes—have the misfortune of entering the public sphere as society-wide Rorschach tests; critics on both sides of the Atlantic just couldn’t resist projecting on Polly.

Leno’s viewers, by contrast, met neither a righteous feminist (Harvey notoriously distanced herself from the term nor a shrewish hysteric, but an earthy farm girl with an impish streak. Not making an overt political statement so much as she was experimenting with her persona, the Harvey of Rid of Me inhabited outlandish new looks and perspectives, seemingly as a way of dividing her newly public identity from her more vulnerable private self. From the ashes of PJ Harvey the band, she was constructing the first iteration of PJ Harvey the solo artist.

Singer-songwriters whose music is intensely emotional, violent, or sexually explicit often have to contend with the assumption that their lyrics are autobiographical. Particularly with female musicians, the word “confessional” tends to come up. In Harvey’s case, her words and the volume at which she delivered them defined her: a “screeching harridan,” a “castrating bitch-queen,” and, in one Rid of Me review that has aged terribly, the “PC” perpetrator of “one of those angry-woman-spews-sexual-politics records.” Listeners weren’t wrong to infer that she wrote from life; she acknowledged that her breakup, as well as the despair she’d felt after moving to London from the country, had influenced the album. Yet it’s her artistic influences, her gender-dysphoric childhood and her sheep-farm upbringing, more than her politics or even her personality, that are most evident on it.

You can almost hear Harvey’s work boots squish through the moorland muck in the burbling bass tones that tie most of the songs together, simmering under the surface of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds,” twitching through the intro to “Yuri-G,” building tension in the hushed interlude a minute before “Dry” launches its final attack. She also imported these sounds from an agricultural region thousands of miles from Dorset: the Mississippi Delta. Rid of Me was neither the first nor the last PJ Harvey album that, unlike the punk-derived rock so many of her white contemporaries were making at the time, felt grounded in the blues. 1995’s To Bring You My Love, her masterpiece of dark sensuality, drew even more heavily on the structures and tropes of American roots music. But Rid of Me is still the PJ Harvey release that succeeds most spectacularly in evoking the unvarnished emotional intensity of the blues without ever resorting to mimicry.

Some of that immediacy came thanks to producer Steve Albini, whom Harvey hired in spite of acquaintances’ warnings about “what he’s like with women.” Just before he’d help Nirvana restore the raw edges of their pre-Nevermind recordings on In Utero, Albini performed his minimalist magic on Rid of Me, capturing the depth of the band’s live sound by working quickly and recording the full trio at once. “I can get precious about things, and Albini doesn’t allow you to do that,” Harvey said in one interview. The band spent barely two weeks in the studio, mixing included. Though Albini’s warts-and-all method was a product of the punk tradition he treasured, its messiness proved equally well-suited to a blues aesthetic; an audible cough at the beginning of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds” suggests the homespun intimacy of a hastily recorded 78.

Like the music of Pixies, whose 1988 debut Surfer Rosa Albini had produced, the album thrives on sudden shifts in volume and tone. It opens, on “Rid of Me,” at a whisper. Even the drums sound like echoes from a mile away until, midway through the track, every instrument shifts to a scream and Harvey spits out the chorus—“Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”—her voice coated in venom. The abruptness only magnifies the impact. Each song is a different scary pop-up book: Turn any page and a three-dimensional monster could leap out at you.

At other moments on the album, it’s the sparseness of the instrumentals that throws Harvey’s words into relief: “I might as well be dead,” she bellows, amid the droning guitars and clanking percussion of “Legs.” Then, suddenly, the song is ending, and only the ghost of a strum accompanies the chilling final line, “But I could kill you instead.” On “Dry,” written for the album of the same name but saved for Rid of Me, a similar quiet sets in the first time Harvey utters the defining kiss-off of her early career: “You leave me dry.”