Word: harvey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harvey didn't stick around to clear things up. Besides a few side projects with interesting talents like Tricky and John Parish, she attests to having grown nervous with her growing fame and unconfident in the kabuki-ish performance art she was creating in concert...
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...