Three years ago, while politely accepting the plaudits for the Mercury Music Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Polly Jean Harvey hinted that her next album would be the very antithesis of Stories' approachability and conventionality. That, combined with its punkily unattractive artwork and the vaguely primordial title, might lead you to expect Uh Huh Her to be a more extreme re-visit of the musical themes of Dry or Rid of Me. Not so. True, on tracks like ‘The Life & Death of Mr Badmouth’ and ‘Cat on the Wall’, the guitars are fuzzed-up and stroppy. But even the vitriolic ‘Who the Fuck’ sounds strangely muted in comparison with the ferocious live version debuted at a handful of gigs last summer.
Musically, this is a minimalist record: acoustic guitars feature heavily; there’s even an interlude of seagull noises. You might call it her rural record, if that didn’t make it sound like a Jethro Tull LP. This stripped-down approach works especially well on the doleful, accordion-flecked ‘Shame’, less so on the wheezy harmonium instrumental ‘The End’, which sounds as if it could be blown away by a light breeze. Tonally, Uh Huh Her most resembles 1998’s Is this Desire? - like that album, it follows a commercially successful predecessor and, like that album, it feels wispily insubstantial at first. But, given repeated listens, it gains a compelling quality that’s considerably greater than the sum of its parts.
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So, then, the crossover success of Stories was a false dawn. Of course it was. PJ Harvey is content to follow the road marked ‘Uncompromising Solo Artist’ (fellow travellers: Bjork, Tom Waits, Beck). She’ll release an album every few years that’ll be devoured by ravenous fans and ignored by all passing traffic. That’s a shame: songwriters as riveting as PJ Harvey deserve a place slap bang in the middle of the mainstream.
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