Word: harvey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fans sorrowed to see her retreat, but if she had to hide out, at least she hid in a studio. The fruits of these three years now arrive in a new album titled Is This Desire? Harvey clearly wishes both to restate to the world what she can do and, as the title implies, to interrogate where music has taken her so far, and where she might still be headed...
...good news--the great, great news--is that Harvey is vocally and technically more proficient than ever, exploring new facets of her talent without diluting the haunted power or thrusting will that have always made her distinctive. The album does not distill any one mood as forcefully as To Bring You My Love did its carnality and despair, but as a project of introspection and self-testing, it requires that Harvey try all new vessels for her rich concoctions of favorite themes...
...album opens with "Angelene," the dry testimony of a world-wise hooker who longs for a lover "two thousand miles away," a yawn of separation that "lays open like a road." The figures in Harvey's tales rarely have access to the lovers they want, but Is This Desire? lends the trope a new layer of richness. Surely we should not ignore that Angelene both scans and rhymes with Polly Jean, and that an album whose title is a question must necessarily begin as a quest. After all, it is not the lover (who may, in fact, be imaginary...
Quieter but even more arresting is "Electric Light," in which an electric organ at the lowest possible pitch substitutes for a flickering neon sign, illuminating and concealing the body of a female lover at regular intervals. The music never changes, and Harvey just watches, confessing that "she tears my heart out, every time." In the last verse, her voice lilts to a high, thin whisper as though all oxygen had run out of the room; the counterpoint to the neon drone bewitches, and Harvey, ever economical, stops the track early before the moment could be lost...
...signal virtue and surest proof of Harvey's talent is that, despite an expansive range of pitches and moods, her craft always combines precision with personality; like a jeweler or carpenter, she preserves the integrity of each song with specific and taut strokes, but incorporates enough elements of personal style--distorted vocals, plodding bass or cavernous echo--that the artist cannot be misidentified. "My Beautiful Leah," in which a phlegmy and diseased voice seeks clues to track the route of an aban-doing lover, lumbers thick and ungainly as a sauropod; "The Garden," by contrast, lilts and whispers like...