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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 19, 2009 4:41:35 GMT -5
Polly and John have added an extra date to their European tour and will now play the Congress centre Auditorium in Murcia, Spain on May 1st as part of the Festival Estrella Levante SOS 4.8 Tickets are available from www.ticktackticket.com and www.atrapalo.com
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 19, 2009 8:19:22 GMT -5
Polly Jean Harvey hit the jackpot in 1988. Back then, she was a small town teenager making trips to nearby Yeovil and in Sherborne, the closest place in her part of England that rock 'n' roll bands came to play. One of her favorites was Automatic Dlamini, led by singer/drummer John Parish. She had even asked them to play her 18th birthday party. Parish and company never played that gig, but Harvey got something even better -- an invitation to join the band. Harvey still remembers going to Parish's house for her audition, sitting in a room and going over guitar parts she would play if she made the cut. "I was utterly petrified," she tells Spinner. Parish eventually set her at ease, by drilling her on a riff until she got it right. "After about the third hour of playing the same line, I began to lose my nerve." Parish remembers Harvey showing up to gigs and giving him tapes of her songs. He was impressed that a teenager could have such an "incredibly mature, wise-sounding voice," and says she was the first person he thought of when he needed a new band member. He enjoyed watching her grow as a musician. "It was exciting watching her change from a shy, retiring 18-year-old to PJ Harvey," Parish tells Spinner. Since then, Parish and Harvey have worked together often, with Parish acting as a musician and producer on several of Harvey's albums, and with their 1996 collaborative album, 'Dance Hall at Louse Point.' Now the pair are releasing their second album together, 'A Woman A Man Walked By.' Like much of Harvey and Parish's work, together or as individuals, 'A Woman A Man Walked By' is both atmospheric and angular, sometimes even confrontational. Their hooks aren't for humming, they're for digging into your subconscious -- primal yet precise. Their history as student and mentor is certainly part of what makes Harvey and Parish so effective as collaborators (Harvey notes that when Parish is playing as her sideman, he can immediately play any guitar part back to her exactly as she played it to him the first time). But they're also kindred musical spirits -- fellow Captain Beefheart fans -- with a distaste for backtracking onto old music ground, even if that might make them more popular. "We both have this kind of unspoken rule -- we're making music for ourselves," Parish says. "We really hope other people like it, but you can't make things for what you think other people might like or might want to buy. You have to do what you want to do and assume if you like it that somebody else is going to like it." www.spinner.com/2009/02/18/pj-harvey-and-john-parish-a-woman-a-man-a-new-album/
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 19, 2009 8:24:08 GMT -5
PJ Harvey and John Parish A Woman, A Man Walked By Island Release Date: 3/20 Tracklisting: 1. Black Hearted Love 2. Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen 3. Leaving California 4. The Chair 5. April 6. A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go 7. The Soldier 8. Pig Will Not 9. Passionless, Pointless 10. Cracks In The Canvas First Impressions: - “Black Hearted Love” is an immediate highlight. The guitars are both irresistibly moody and catchy, and PJ’s voice is smooth and totally seductive. - PJ is a total chameleon, fitting her voice to the lyrics and mood of each song. “These days just seem to crush me,” she sings on “April,” with the shaky, worn-down voice to match. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s really not – actually, it’s quite powerful. - The album’s expletive-laced and nastily growled title track will certainly raise a few eyebrows. - “Pig Will Not” is one song that won’t fade into the background, featuring a ferocious PJ yelling and barking a whole lot. It takes an interesting twist, though, when it ends with the soothing plinks of a piano. - A Woman, A Man Walked By ends on the delicate and really very lovely “Cracks in the Canvas,” a lullaby complete with ethereal whispers that urge you to “go to sleep.” Key Tracks: “Black Hearted Love,” “April,” “Pig Will Not” Predictions: A Woman, A Man Walked By is an alluring combination of the sexy, the creepy and the abrasive. There are plenty of intriguing contrasts, but not all of the tracks on PJ Harvey’s latest will resonate with those uninitiated to her style. Still, most everyone will find at least a few stunning and memorable tunes on the album. www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=18469&c=1
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 21, 2009 15:43:31 GMT -5
JP/PJ on the cover of Filter's "Good Music Guide": www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=18483&c=1 "Would you say your relationship with each other has changed over the years? Parish: It’s more grown than changed. We connected from when we first met and trusted each other and that’s only grown as we’ve got older and our careers have developed. Harvey: [The music] comes out sounding of a certain feeling; it has a certain soul to it. We get along as friends because of this similarity in soul, which comes through music, too."
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 25, 2009 14:47:37 GMT -5
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 25, 2009 14:48:18 GMT -5
Black Hearted Love Worldwide Premier On Zane Lowes Radio One Show - Monday March 2nd! Tune into Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio One show on Monday night, March 2nd , from 7pm when he will exclusively play ‘Black Hearted Love; the upcoming single from Polly & John’s forthcoming album. Click here for more info on the show. The track will then be available to download digitally that night from www.pjharvey.net and www.johnparish.com and from all usual outlets the following day. www.pjharvey.net/
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 27, 2009 19:40:37 GMT -5
I really have high hopes for this song. Should be a great first single.
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Post by Modern Method. on Feb 27, 2009 19:43:44 GMT -5
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 2, 2009 21:19:01 GMT -5
Black Hearted Love is AMAZING! Well worth the wait.
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 4, 2009 20:24:17 GMT -5
AGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PJ Harvey Already Working on New Solo Album PJ Harvey's new album with longtime collaborator John Parish, titled 'A Woman a Man Walked By,' doesn't hit proverbial shelves until March 31, but Harvey has already begun working on the follow-up to her 2007 solo album, 'White Chalk.' "I've demoed my own next record," she tells Spinner. "I'll hopefully be recording that in the spring of next year." While Harvey was mum on specifics, she did say that she plans to ask frequent collaborators Flood and Mick Harvey, along with Parish, to produce. Harvey also promises that the new material pushes her once again into unexplored territory. "All I can say is that I am pleased with it, because I feel it's a grand departure from anything before," she says. "If I've done that, then for me, it's worked. I'm already feeling like I did, and I'm happy. I'm very pleased because I'm not repeating myself." www.spinner.com/2009/03/03/pj-harvey-already-working-on-new-solo-album/
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 9, 2009 4:06:45 GMT -5
Shy girl or she-wolf? Will the real Polly Harvey please stand up. On stage, she's a siren in a pink catsuit. In person, she is still and self-contained. We met the enigmatic singer at the village pub .... Amy Raphael The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009 Early for our interview, I encounter Polly Jean Harvey in the freezing toilets of a Somerset pub. She is locked in a cubicle, changing outfits and shivering. I drop the toilet paper and it rolls under the divide. She laughs and pushes it back. She is chatty, friendly even, suggesting a visit to the local church in East Coker where TS Eliot's ashes are buried. She thinks his heart may be here but the rest of him elsewhere. A little later we meet formally and sit at an old wooden table near the back of the pub. Next to her is John Parish, her old friend, musical soulmate and sometime collaborator. He has co-produced several of her albums, including her last - the beautiful, piano-driven White Chalk. In 1996 they made Dance Hall at Louse Point together, with Parish writing the music and Harvey the lyrics. Now they're back with the bruising, brilliant A Woman A Man Walked By. Harvey luxuriates in Parish's presence, not only as a musical peer but also as a protective force: "Interviews are less draining, less intense with John." Harvey orders Earl Grey tea with milk, no sugar. She wears skinny black jeans with black high heels and is wrapped in a big black coat beneath which are layers of black. Her wavy hair is black, her skin pale as chalk, her lips a gash of blood red. She is quite beautiful and still. The stillness is disconcerting. As a performer Harvey is feral, a hypnotic combination of early Mick Jagger carnality and Iggy Pop abandon. Singing, shouting or even rasping her post-punk blues, she makes the kind of music that you feel as much as hear. In interviews, however, she is notoriously private. Harvey would rather not be at this table, talking about herself or her music; when we first met in 1995 she confessed to an almost paralysing shyness. She could, she said, barely bring herself to walk into a room full of people and "would rather be on my own than at a party". As she lets loose on stage, whether in a long white dress or, most memorably, in a figure-hugging pink catsuit at Glastonbury, so Harvey writes lyrics without any notion of self-censorship. Since forming the band PJ Harvey in Dorset in 1991 she has sung about sex and menstruation ("Tarzan... stop your screaming/ Can't you see I'm bleeding?/ Don't ruin it on me" on "Me-Jane"), about murder and longing ("Down by the Water"). But, she will insist, these are just stories. And even if they're told in the first person, they are not personal. Early on, Elvis Costello observed that all her songs "seemed to be about blood and fucking", and for a while she was cast as the female Nick Cave. There is a definite darkness to Harvey - it's what makes her music so seductive - but there is also a playfulness that is often overlooked. She may not appear particularly coltish in person but her early work at least is drenched in so much sexual metaphor that if she wasn't being ironic she'd be seriously disturbed. "When the first album, Dry, came out in 1992 I was totally bemused by how people interpreted the lyrics. I had no idea anyone would weave and construct various theories behind what I'd written. A song like 'Legs', which is on the second album, Rid of Me, is basically about cutting a lover's legs off because he won't go away. It's hardly to be taken seriously." If Harvey's lyrics were really taken straight from her diary, I suggest, she'd be a serial killer by now. She laughs. "Absolutely. The sexual metaphors in the early songs were coupled with being a much younger woman who was beginning to explore those areas. I write differently now because I've covered a lot of ground and I don't feel I need to cover it again." Harvey is always tough on herself musically; most of all she is loath to repeat herself. So each record is different in some way from the last. Rid of Me was defiantly non-commercial, from its black-and-white cover image of an androgynous Harvey flinging wet hair around to its abrasive, claustrophobic music. Yet by the time she wrote Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in New York in 2000, she was ready to embrace pop (her most successful album but not her favourite, it left her feeling "unsatisfied"). "Black Hearted Love", the opening track of A Woman A Man Walked By, is another rollicking pop song but thereafter the album is a mix of Captain Beefheart (the title track, with its jerky, high-pitched vocal and mock nasty lyrics: "That woman man, I want his fucking ass") and reflective ballads ("Passionless, Pointless"). Both Harvey and Parish have an old-fashioned approach to music, preferring tape to digital in the studio, vinyl to iTunes at home. They are both strong-willed and brutally honest with one another, which occasionally leads to week-long impasses. In the end, however, it means they are completely happy with their creative output. The bigger question, perhaps, is this: in the year she turns 40, is Polly Harvey any more content than she has been in the past? She had a happy if sheltered childhood in Dorset, where she was the only girl in the village. A tomboy, she kept her hair cropped and was happy to be mistaken for a boy until, at 14, she became interested in the opposite sex. Her parents often woke Polly and her brother by playing Captain Beefheart and Bob Dylan at 3am. She saw Dylan and the Stones before she was 10. As a teenager she played the saxophone and guitar in bands but "never entertained music as a vocation". In the early 90s she moved to London to study sculpture at St Martins College but ended up deferring for a year when Too Pure offered a record deal. What happened next is unclear: old interviews talk of a first nervous breakdown around the time of Rid of Me and a subsequent one in 1995. In the past she has been quoted as saying, "I was not well," and, "I was very mixed up." When I met her back in 1995 Harvey talked about the end of 1991 as a time when her first big relationship ended and London proved overwhelmingly alienating. She told me that she returned to Dorset, locked herself away in a flat above a cafe and wrote Rid of Me (although she now has a flat in LA she still spends most of her time in Dorset). At some point during the interview the barman, who had known Polly most of her life, told her she was "too thin to go on tour". If she's had an eating disorder in the past, Harvey is not going to discuss it. She looks great now and perhaps she considers the matter private, history, irrelevant. Instead I ask what went wrong when she moved to London. "A friend and I were renting a really horrible place in Tottenham that was cold and damp. I didn't have any money. Everything started taking off with the band and I was doing my first interviews." So she told journalists how unhappy she was and, in her mind at least, the whole episode has become a kind of urban myth in which she was simply a typical student type who was portrayed as an artist falling apart. Years of reticence have made Harvey a mysterious figure in the way few pop stars are these days. Björk memorably said that she reminded her of Clint Eastwood: "Everything is understated." We do know, however, that she dated Nick Cave and broke his heart (as documented to great effect on his 1997 album The Boatman's Call). She was once seen running around with actor Vincent Gallo but both have denied a romance. When we met in 1995 she said she was broody; is this still the case? Harvey looks horrified. "Did I say that?" She laughs slightly hysterically. "Gosh! Hmmm. I definitely feel..." She sits perfectly still. "It's not something I need to go out and pursue. I feel open... if it was the right moment and all of that. It's all some of my good friends wanted to do, have kids. I've never had that feeling. Then again, I don't rule it out." Harvey is an odd mass of contradictions. Right from the start of her career, when she was only in her early 20s, she has been in control ("I've always had a very clear idea of what I want to do musically") and yet she has always refused to label herself a feminist. Even now she can't think of a single moment where she's been discriminated against as a female rock star. "Maybe I'm just purely lucky. If I've come up against obstacles I've always found another way around it." Parish acknowledges that female artists are usually packaged differently to male artists but insists that Polly stands outside the norm. "We could talk about Duffy, Adele and the new wave of female artists in the same sentence; you can't do that with PJ Harvey because there isn't anyone else. Polly has always been in control of her career and was never going to be manipulated like so many women are." If there is a female artist to be mentioned in the same sentence as PJ Harvey, it's Patti Smith. The two share a punk spirit that manifests itself in an absolute refusal to conform. Remarkably, Harvey had never heard Smith until comparisons were drawn. "I thought I'd better listen to her at that point. I discovered Easter in my parents' record collection - I didn't even know it was there. I've met her a few times since and she's a charismatic, wonderful person to be around..." The pub is ready to shut. There is time for one more question so I ask how she feels about turning 40. She grimaces. "I remember turning 30 and it feeling really not OK. It was so hard..." For a moment I think she's going to open up, confess all. Then she catches herself and smiles quickly. "But 40 feels OK. It's going to be all right." • A Woman A Man Walked By is released on Island on 30 March Harvey's career Born Polly Jean Harvey 1969 in Bridport, Dorset to a stonemason father and sculptress mother. Later studied sculpture at Central St. Martins. 1992 Debut album Dry wins her a cult following. 1993 Signs to Island, releasing two albums before the career-defining To Bring You My Love in 1995. 1996 Releases Dance Hall at Louse Point with John Parish. Provides guest vocals on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads 2001 Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea wins the Mercury Prize. 2004 Appears on Marianne Faithfull and Mark Lanegan albums. 2006 Eighth studio album, White Chalk 2009 Collaborates with John Parish on new album A Woman a Man Walked By. www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/08/pj-harvey-interview
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 10, 2009 5:08:58 GMT -5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- thequietus.com/articles/01249-pj-harvey-john-parish-a-woman-a-man-walked-by-album-review "PJ Harvey surprised many last year by bringing out an album so small in scale, so finnicky and chilly, that many critics saw it as a stubborn step back into dilemma by an artist who flourishes there. Though Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and Uh Huh Her have seen the majority of her commercial success, stylistically White Chalk saw her taking more risks than at any time since her first solo record, 1995's To Bring You My Love. Working principally on the piano, until then an unfamiliar instrument, Harvey's compositions became a specialist lens through which to view spectral characters and stories otherwise lost to view. Both To Bring You My Love and White Chalk were produced by John Parish, his approach a dextrous combination of flexibility and sureness of touch perhaps needed by such otherwise static and abhuman records. The release of A Woman A Man Walked By sees the pair's second collaboration with Parish in the songwriter's chair, the first being Dance Hall At Louse Point, the 1996 album into which Harvey retreated after the effort and exhaustion of To Bring You My Love. Louse Point found Harvey sending her narrators out to wander the sinister mazes of Parish's songs, an approach she clearly found liberating; her subsequent album, Is This Desire, contained some of her most accomplished, confident character writing to date, finally seeing off the biographical readings that had dominated critical response to her work until then. Once again in A Woman A Man Walked By Parish has provided the settings for Harvey's lyrical and vocal explorations. Perhaps fittingly after such a long wait, here the overriding feeling is one of glee; there's a familiarity in contending for space among Parish's often laden tonal picture. Where the lyrics might seem bereft or even hopeless, the tone is often contrastingly bold, even knowing. Harvey plays syllabic guessing-games, chasing from phrase to phrase of Parish's arrangement. "Pieces, pieces of my love," she sings almost triumphantly over a swelling, urgent piano and percussion break, before abruptly settling down into a set of descending phrases like a nesting duck. In the song's final moments, to no accompaniment, Harvey tells its whole secret story: "..washed away in the water that took my son." It's a cold heart or a brave black humour that can abandon such a line in the reeds, and elsewhere on this album, a piratical swagger lends distance to Harvey's almost Von Trierian penchant for feminine extremity. Whether daring her lover to outblacken her heart ('Black Hearted Love') or squealing and barking in animalistic protest ('Pig Will Not') , Harvey's gutsy take on genderfuck is literal and particular, an organic critique. The title track is especially explicit: Harvey explores the "lily livered little parts", the "chicken liver balls" and "damp alleyways" of a cowardly "woman-man", joyfully enumerating his various lacks, his premature balding, his inadequate "little toy", before concluding "I WANT HIS FUCKING ASS". Parish's skewed, simple little riff gradually yields to thunderous drums that counter the vocal rhythm. This is no mere murder ballad; this is torture stomp. Harvey's sexual aggression and gendered take on body horror owes much to Diamanda Galas, whose blithe take on sexual revenge is possibly best captured in 'The Sporting Life', as she chatters and cackles her way through the rape, torture and lynching of a trick by prostitutes. For all its cocksurety and buttlust, this album deftly isolates some moments of dreamy uncertainty. 'Passionless, Pointless' is a photographic re-examination of an ended relationship, casting slight variations of perspective on the same small, telling events: "I slept facing the wall; I dreamed of buildings in pieces. You slept facing the wall, and you wanted less than I wanted." No modern songwriter is more capable of enumerating heartbreak's immersive power than Harvey; snapshots of memory are examined for clues and flicked to the floor. But the pictures change for the looking, become meaningless. "I don't remember," sings Harvey quietly. "How did we ever...?" Parish's guitar shimmers a chordal cloud of disquiet over the verses, then picks a silver thread through the refrain, and discordant flutes contest one another for a way through the confusion. Musically as much as through the narrative, the song argues persuasively for the phantasmagorical turmoil in everyday tragedy, the awful specialness of common loss. It's Harvey's good fortune that in this collaboration she can make such characteristic work, and Parish's loss that his contribution may well be overlooked by fans, frustrated by the trenchant experimentalism of White Chalk, who are waiting for Harvey's return to the blues-based rock idiom."
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 10, 2009 5:09:32 GMT -5
www.roomthirteen.com/cgi-bin/cd_view.cgi?CDID=9779 "PJ Harvey and John Parish have teamed up again to follow up 1996’s ‘Dance Hall At Louse Point’. It’s very much classic PJ Harvey, steering away from the folk roots of her last album, ‘White Chalk’ and introducing some more energising guitar work, although maintaining the singer’s trademark earthiness. Tracks like, ‘The Chair’ are certainly aided by some crashing percussion and cantankerous bursts of guitar work that spur the dreamy melody on. ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ is an aggressive, fractious lyrical outburst in the vein of Nick Cave’s worst, it features Harvey and Parish growling, “Just to get up your fucking arse” over a raging guitar tune; taken out of context it may sound a little extreme but the vitriol sounds justified in the tune which quickly fades into the spiralling instrumental, ‘The Crow Knows Where All The Children Go’, a sprightly mix of shimmery guitar and glittering percussion. ‘Pig Will Not’ is a wild and crazed fable stitched together from Harvey’s preaching and raging yelps and a fierce backing of percussion and lithe guitars. Elsewhere there are the typically delicate Harvey tracks, ‘April’ is a beautiful, understated number with tender insecurity while, ‘The Soldier’ may be slightly buried between two more forceful tracks, but it’s a sweet little string-accompanied song with soft, whimsical vocals that contrast its bloody lyrics. ‘Passionless, Pointless’ is a pretty, fresh-sounding number with florid backing and soothing vocals. ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ is pretty much what you expect of PJ Harvey these days, although her spontaneity and unusual ideas are as much part of her work as any other distinguishing marks. It’s a strange and surreal affair that will leave you more puzzled that satiated, but PJ Harvey has never produced easy listening so it wouldn’t be expected of her or creative comrade Parish."
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 13, 2009 16:22:43 GMT -5
GENRE-DEFYING Dorset musician Polly Jean – PJ – Harvey is performing a rare home gig in Bridport tomorrow. The globally famous star will perform with her long-time collaborator John Parish to kick off a world tour supporting their latest album, A Woman A Man Walked By. The CD will hit the shops at the end of this month and the accompanying tour will take Polly and John across Europe. She will also be performing solo for Camp Bestival at Lulworth Castle in July. Arts centre director, Lindsay Brooks said, “We’re very excited that PJ Harvey has chosen Bridport Arts Centre as the first stop on her forthcoming tour. She told us: ‘It has been wonderful to have such a supportive, creative space as Bridport Arts Centre around me as I have grown up, and over the years I have seen many memorable events, as well as being able to use it for my own performances. It is still a place that I like to go to and perform in.’ “I’m sure our audience will be delighted to welcome her back!” PJ grew up on her parents’ farm at Corscombe where music – mainly Captain Beefheart and the blues – was part of everyday life. As a teenager she learned the saxophone and was in several bands while studying sculpture at Yeovil College before joining the Bristol-based collaboration Automatic Dlamini with John Parish and Rob Ellis. Her first solo single Dress was picked by John Peel as the NME’s single of the week and her second release Sheela na Gig was equally lauded. By 1995, Polly was nominated for the Mercury prize and two Grammy awards, and bagged the Artist of the Year award from Rolling Stone and Spin magazines. In 2000, her album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, influenced by New York and Dorset, was hailed as her best to date and won the South bank Show Award. Her latest album, 2007’s White Chalk, was another huge success. Throughout her career, PJ Harvey has confounded and amazed her critics and fans and her performance at Bridport is the perfect chance to see her at her best, on home territory, with the man who, musically, has been with her since the beginning. www.thisishampshire.net/leisure/onstage/4192510.PH_Harvey_performs_home_gig_in_Bridport/
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 13, 2009 17:23:06 GMT -5
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 14, 2009 17:15:21 GMT -5
NEW YORK (Billboard) - PJ Harvey stormed onto the music scene in 1992 with "Dry," and over the past 17 years she has released one critically acclaimed album after another. She has never had a commercial hit -- her biggest-selling album, 2000's "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea," sold 299,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan -- but she remains a formidable creative force. Now Harvey is back with a new album, her second collaboration with composer John Parish. As they did with their previous effort, 1996's "Dance Hall at Louse Point," Parish wrote all the music and then gave it to Harvey to write the lyrics. The product of this musical experiment can be heard on "A Woman a Man Walked By," due March 31 on Island Def Jam. Billboard: What were your thoughts when you first heard the music Parish sent to you? PJ Harvey: I thought it was very challenging. You can sort the songs into two groups -- a batch of eight and another batch of eight. I immediately had thoughts for some, but others I thought, "What on earth am I going to do with that?" For instance, the music he sent me for "Pig Will Not" and "A Woman a Man Walked By" seemed particularly impenetrable. Billboard: How long did it take to write the lyrics? Harvey: I suppose after he had sent me the music, I would play it a lot, over and over again, without trying to think of anything other than how it made me feel. And then I began to find the melodies, looking to make a good marriage of the music with the voice. I felt like the way the voice presented itself, it had to not only enhance the atmosphere that was already there, but hopefully make it stronger. I find that the pieces of music that he gave me already had a very strong feeling of atmosphere and emotion going on in them. Billboard: Is this style of composing more difficult than your other work? Harvey: Not really. In fact, it's less difficult, because I don't have to write the music. In that sense, it's quite freeing, because I only have to think about words, which I love. That's all I do anyway -- play with words, write words, put words on pages, poems and prose -- all day, every day. That's something I thrive on, that I love. And singing, that's a joy, so in a way it's much easier than writing my own solo work. Also, John gives music that I would never come up with, so I find that inspiring. Billboard: Had you and Parish wanted to do another album like this? Harvey: We had always intended to, but it was nothing ever set in stone. But it's a very natural process for us. We're friends anyway and speak all the time. I've always valued his opinion in my work enormously. Our relationship is ongoing, and it felt natural that we wanted to make another one. Billboard: Did any lyrical themes emerge? Harvey: I had no specific concept for this record, other than John and I passionately wanting to find new ground, for both of us. It's a very varied record. Billboard: Have you started working on a follow-up to your last album, 2007's "White Chalk?" Harvey: I've written it all, actually. I'm just going to wait until the spring of next year before I start recording it. I'm not sure how eventually it will turn out; I didn't write on piano, but I can't really say at this stage. All I can say is that I did try to write something that I felt was challenging and very different than what I've done before. uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUKTRE52C66D20090313?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 19, 2009 14:57:55 GMT -5
From topless indie pin-up to tormented folk mythologist, cult pop monarch Polly Jean Harvey has long exposed and scrutinised the predicaments of the human condition. She’s populated copious roles over her swaggering, nigh-on 20-year career: doggedly androgynous rock provocateur (1992’s Dry); bile-addled feminist recalcitrant (1993’s Rid of Me); hammed-up, blues-lubed pageant vamp (1995’s To Bring You My Love); Mercury-winning household name (2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea); and myriad masquerades hence. Beneath these deviant sub-cultural veneers, however – and amidst an aesthetic that thrives on murder balladry, bucolic histrionics and cadaverous vernacular – there’s an often overlooked leitmotif that imbues the Dorset popster’s muse: that is to say, she likes a laugh. Said conviviality has rarely been more evident – or entertaining – than on A Woman A Man Walked By: Harvey’s second album in cahoots with enduring collaborator and co-producer John Parish. The tumultuous axe rapture of opening track ‘Black Hearted Love’ initiates a darkly comic (yet frequently poignant) assault of colossal riffage, ukulele freak-outs, mangy soul and brawny R&B. It variously witnesses our stirring protagonist excogitate the joys of offal (the epically deranged title track); imitate Macy Gray (the porch-swing dirge of ‘April’); and, best of all, bark like a dog (the ludicrous, grunge-pillaging ‘Pig Will Not’). If such aberrant revelry is at odds with the luminous rigour of 2007’s White Chalk – an album hailed as Harvey’s finest to date – it’s testament to her relentless inventiveness: dismembering guises; defiling confines; violating the knackered rock canon. And what do you know: she’s smiling. www.list.co.uk/article/16642-pj-harvey-john-parish-a-woman-a-man-walked-by/
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 19, 2009 14:58:40 GMT -5
In 2007, Polly Jean Harvey surprised her fans by centering White Chalk around the piano, an instrument she admitted to never having played previously. Two years later, the shock and awe on A Woman a Man Walked By, her new duo record with longtime collaborator John Parish, arrives in a somewhat down-and-dirtier fashion: "I want your fucking ass!" she growls over a ragged psychobilly groove in the delightful title track, which also finds her describing somebody's "chicken-liver heart," "chicken-liver spleen," and—oh, yes—"chicken-liver balls." Clearly, the global economic crisis has cut into her euphemism budget in a frightfully serious way. Not that Harvey's ever cared much about sparing anyone's delicate constitution, of course. ("Robert De Niro, sit on my face," she famously demanded of the Shark Tale star in "Reeling," from 1993's 4-Track Demos.) Still, much of A Woman feels particularly brutal, even by her considerable standards, with the singer pushing her voice to its various extremes over cracked noise-roots arrangements that often suggest Sonic Youth having a go at the Carter Family songbook. In the way it lurches from riff to riff, the album plays more like a sequel to Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey's pointedly disjunctive 2004 disc, than to the unified White Chalk. According to the artist herself, it's neither—rather, A Woman belatedly follows up her and Parish's first co-billed joint, Dance Hall at Louse Point, which they put out way back in 1996. "The two experiences couldn't be more different," she says of the contrast between making a PJ Harvey record and a Harvey/Parish record. She's calling from Bristol, England, on a break from rehearsal; now that they've gotten around to releasing something, the two musicians have assembled a band and are hitting the road for a tour that includes a show this weekend at South by Southwest in Austin and one March 26 at the Fillmore New York. For a PJ Harvey album, she continues, "Everything is generated by me. But when I do a record with John, it's a very simple 50-50 division: He writes the music, and I write the lyrics and vocals. I don't have a starting point until he's given me the music, then I have something to run with." Parish says that making another collaborative disc "was something we always intended to do and always talked about," but other projects kept intervening. (Parish has produced albums by Tracy Chapman, the Eels, and Giant Sand, and released two handsome solo efforts through Thrill Jockey.) The seeds for A Woman were sown when Harvey discovered a forgotten demo of a song the pair had written together called "Black Hearted Love." Says Parish with a laugh: "Polly played it and phoned me immediately and said, 'This is fantastic—we've got to make a new album!' " "Black Hearted Love," which opens the new set, is indeed fantastic, a Chrissie Hynde–cool guitar-rock gem that applies the insistent rush of PJ's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea to an account of volunteering one's soul for murder. But all 10 tracks demonstrate the uncommon creative bond between the two, who've known each other since Harvey asked Parish's early band Automatic Dlamini to play her 18th birthday party. This is not a record that sounds like it was composed in two distinct parts: Though Parish wrote the music before knowing what Harvey would add, his pieces perfectly cushion her vocals; likewise, her lyrics tease out of the music themes you can hear bubbling beneath the dirt-caked guitars and junk-shop percussion. Autolux drummer Carla Azar, who traveled from Los Angeles to Bristol to play on the album, says Harvey "really looks up to John and learned a lot from him. They just have this profound respect for each other. If Polly disagreed with John about something in the studio, she might mention it, but then she'd turn to me and say, 'I trust him—he knows what he's doing.' " "I always thrive on collaborating with someone who can do things I can't," says Harvey. "John's palette is much wider than mine. His stuff is very intricate and unusual, but it's also moving and emotionally engaging. As a singer, it's very exciting to see what you can come up with to match that." On A Woman, Harvey accomplishes this by wildly varying her attack, ascending to the upper reaches of her falsetto in "Leaving California," croaking like a post-punk Miss Havisham in "April," and loosing an agonized primal scream in "Pig Will Not." "I've always been a very instinctive singer," Harvey admits. "I never really feel that I'm directing what I'm doing. I just let the music tell me how to sing it—and on the John records, that changes song to song." Both Harvey and Parish agree that the new album feels more finished—"less like a sketchbook," as the latter puts it—than Louse Point, parts of which Harvey says sound incomplete to her ears now. "As writers, we're able to take things further than we were at that stage," Parish explains, while Harvey adds that the new songs work almost like short stories: "They have little beginnings, middles, and ends. The music is very sure of itself and knows what it's doing." www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-18/music/pj-harvey-and-john-parish-reconvene/
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 19, 2009 14:59:51 GMT -5
There aren't enough mournful waltzes about California, for sure, and certainly not enough by PJ Harvey, whose new collaboration with guitarist John Parish, A Woman A Man Walked By, features the gorgeous, floating one-two-three ballad of lost love, "Leaving California." In a sentiment most of us have uttered at one time or another, she confesses, "I don't know why I'd stay/I think it's time to leave." Critical superlatives at this point are meaningless when it comes to one of rock¹s great vocalists/songwriters/instrumentalists/charismatics, but it wouldn't feel right not telling you that A Woman A Man Walked By is Polly Jean Harvey at the peak of her powers, a rich, velvet-upholstered ten-song creation featuring humming church organ ballads ("April"); defiant, emasculating indictments (the title track features the amazing lines: "He had chicken liver balls/he had chicken liver spleen/he had chicken liver heart/made of chicken liver parts/lily-livered little parts/lily-livered little parts"); a mandolin dream-ditty riddle about a soldier¹s sorrow, "The Soldier"; and seven other equally thrilling and complicated songs. Bonus for this El Rey show: Opener Howe Gelb, best known as the king of Giant Sand, is a longtime collaborator of both Harvey and Parish; the combination, either merely on the bill or, hopefully, in some sort of onstage get-together, bodes well for a great night of music. www.laweekly.com/events/pj-harvey-and-john-parish-493500/
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Post by Modern Method. on Mar 19, 2009 15:00:42 GMT -5
One day, so the story goes, Thomas Hardy's wife told a visitor that her husband would be down soon but he was currently writing a poem about death. The friend expressed concern as to Hardy's mood. Oh no, she assured him, Thomas was in excellent spirits. Perhaps Polly Jean Harvey, a native of Hardy country, knows the story. Certainly, few singer-songwriters have so consistently scorned the idea that emotion dictates art. Since the hair-raising candour of 1993's Rid of Me invited unwelcome speculation, she has made herself a moving target. With each record she sheds her skin - now banshee blues, now West Country gothic, now Radio 2 rock - while with each interview she disdains the concept of the artist as diarist. Listeners who detect a kernel of emotional truth in each new persona will have to draw their own conclusions. You might infer that the woman who sang of New York and new love on the Mercury-scooping Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea was in a happier headspace than the one who roamed, ghost-like, across the blighted moors and crags of White Chalk, but she couldn't possibly comment. In the press notes to A Woman a Man Walked By, her first record with multi-instrumentalist John Parish since 1996's Dance Hall at Louse Point, she frames the record as a project, a diversion, a lark - in other words, a minor work. So how come it's so unexpectedly captivating? This is a piecemeal work glued together by sheer, throat-grabbing charisma. The sly, sensual opener, Black Hearted Love ("When you cry out my name in rapture/ I volunteer my soul for murder"), may be her most robust rock song in years, but it soon surrenders to the racked mantra of Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen and the waltz-time mountain music of Leaving California. The chill mists of White Chalk cling to The Soldier, in which Harvey dreams of being a combatant who walks "on the faces of dead women". Such moments of eerie hush are ruptured by bursts of dissonant clamour. Pig Will Not finds Harvey woofing like a dog, while A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go displays the demonic mischief of Nick Cave: a balefully funny account of a man with "lily-livered balls" which vomits forth the lunatic threat, "I want your fucking ass." Although it's as uncentred as 2004's Uh Huh Her, this album broadcasts confidence rather than confusion. None of Harvey's identities - the teasing, the carnal, the violent, the bereft - sound like mere poses. So you could take her at her word and decide she's just an ordinary girl who likes playing with the costume box, or you could divine all manner of undisclosed personal drama from the neurotic vitality of her songs. Who knows which is closer to the truth? And when the music is this compelling, does it matter? www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/mar/15/pj-harvey-john-parish-review
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