There are artists who operate as holistics and healers, lifting the spirit, rousing the body. Then there are the pathologists and post-mortemizers that map the anatomy of cancers.
On her last album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, PJ Harvey played against daguerreotype as the former, celebrating the gorgeous nausea of infatuation in the endorphin rush of tunes like ‘Good Fortune’ or ‘You Said Something’. With retrospect, she might plead love as temporary insanity. Now she’s back in the lab with the forceps and the petri dish, performing cross sections on the heart’s tumours. One thinks of Burroughs’ theory of hidden vested interest – the surgeon’s relationship with disease, the enforcer’s with crime. PJ may be an agent of love, but she’s on hawkish watch for its opposite.
All this preamble boils down to a louse-ridden guitar figure being clubbed by an unfinessed drum and the line “Baby you’ve got a bad mouth.” So begins her sixth album proper. Here, Polly seems to gulp for oxygen as she lets slip lines like “Your lips taste of poison” and “Shame is the shadow of love” over a deck cut between blues-crude and atmospheric abstractions. ‘Who The Fuck’ simultaneously sounds like no-one else but also reminds us how much the Yeah Yeah Yeahs snatched from her convulsive yelps and fractious guitar hand.
The sonic approach may not be quite so pornographic as Rid Of Me, and in fact at times this record is almost pastoral (‘Pocket Knife’ is primitivist folk art with Appalachian changes, ‘Desperate Kingdom Of Love’ Bonnie Princess Billie doing Dylan at his most gnomic), but it also thrives on a kind of obsessive-compulsive attention to detail. In this context, a love song like ‘It’s You’ has as much to do with Jungian ego/id phobias (“When I’m not with you I dream of my hair just falling out”) as heart’s desire. And as ever, she’s a fine character actress, by turns playing the Victorian consumptive, street waif, rural shut-in, feral moors dweller and reluctant child bride being entreated by a no-good morphine fiend.
Uh Huh Her is a coroner’s report written by a poet, a beautifully lit atrocity exhibition with photographs of lesions and sores, DNA swabs, venereal smears and samples of bodily fluids congealed and soured on the skin. In other words, love in a time of gangrene. It ain’t for the faint, and is all the better for it.