4 Track Demos

PJ HARVEY: "4 Track Demos" (Island)

MY CD player has metamorphosed - it's now a couch, a confessional, a pew garden that reeks [sic] of Polly Harvey's sweat and tears. I should be charging consultancy rates for this.

Having sidled her way into heaps of record collections with last year's Dry, a dazzling hybrid of grief, bewilderment and sheer eroticism that left not only the critics but PJ herself intoxicated and slightly askew with the world, she's back to supplement June's follow-up Rid Of Me with a slew of unreleased demo tracks and reworkings that somehow never quite made it onto the racks. And how she howls.

If you thought that Bjork had a monopoly on pained whoops and hollers that emerge from the belly, guts 'n' all, then take a listen to this. While the retreads of 'Yuri-G' and 'Ecstacy' might bear a distant kinship to toons, the rest belches from the speakers in vomitous bucketloads. (And the graphic details go nowhere near illustrating the seriousness of her psychic/intestinal disorder.)

'Reeling' is a static-drowned doom-wish that screeches and bellows, howls and bawls like a spoilt child intent on raiding the candy jar as you watch. 'Easy' swaps feminine intuition for Cobain's adolescent rantings amid a grunge-laden guitar and comes up smelling of turpentine and methylated spirits - just what Harvey craves.

Monotone rather than monotonous in that it peddles the same noise-soaked material throughout, but fastens diverse lyrical ideas to each track, "4 Track Demos" does little to advance the gospel according to PJ Harvey apart from cranking up the volume just one more time. It's the out-takes and the almost-rans; the possibles and the passibles. But hardly the essentials.

I'd stick with Dry and Rid Of Me unless you want to partake in a further emotional catharsis in the privacy of your own home. Me? I thought I'd seen the back of all those ablutions and purgations when I parted ways with John Paul II's brigade.

Old habits die hard I guess. A half hour with PJ and I'm flailing and pummeling myself with the zeal of the truly fixated, chanting "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grevious fault". Just like old times . . .

• Siobhán Long