PJ Harvey

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

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"Confucius say: Thus the ancient kings made music In order to honor merit."

On Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea, PJ Harvey is back, and so is her guitar.

Her second album, Rid of Me, was, as Robert Christgau put it, the first time a woman's guitar was recorded louder than her voice. She strayed from the path a bit with her three subsequent albums, focusing on organs and electronics. That work was an acquired taste, but a rewarding one (as anyone who saw her live would attest), like aged scotch. Her new album, though, swigs bourbon straight from the bottle, snorts speed with the A-heads and aims straight for the gutter.

And yes, as you might have heard, it does notably resemble certain 1970's New York/Detroit punk bands. But can you think of a better era to play off of?

The opener, "Big Exit," out-Sleaters Sleater-Kinney by bringing it back to the Stooges, restraining and burying the drums over the righteous 6/4 stomp of the guitars, and proving once again that PJ has one of the best voices in rock 'n' roll. Here, as throughout the album, she revitalizes her classic guitar style of deceptively simplistic, vamping chord/riff structures by putting it out front, and letting the repetition become the melody. She makes rhythm guitars as potent a weapon as a well-programmed drum machine without resorting to flashy distortion. Who needs lead guitars?

It becomes breathtaking after a while that she is able to take these familiar artists and remake them in her own style: "Kamikaze" is Patti Smith, "Good Fortune" is Television, and "You Said Something" is the New York Dolls. The power and the beauty of each at their best is filtered through her voice, and her guitar - oh, that guitar!

On some albums you don't talk about the songs, but here they grab you and hold you and make you write ransom notes attesting to your well-being and good treatment despite the obvious drops of perspiration staining the page. "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" shows how she can wrest an entire sustained tone into the furious burst of her single-syllable lyrics and then twist the longer words back onto themselves. The highly-anticipated duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke, "This Mess We're In," is worth the wait, striking but not jarring in the tone shift, and wholly amazing.

But the core of the album lies in the easy-to-overlook fifth track, "Beautiful Feeling," which needs nothing more than an electric guitar and her breathtaking voice to make a perfect song. In this, it resembles 4-Track Demos, her first "solo" album consisting of demos for Rid of Me. That album, and this song, truly embodies the DIY aesthetic, attesting that if you trust your guitar enough, and trust your voice enough, you can make beautiful music that doesn't sound like anything else. There are other elements here, but the root of Stories From the City is PJ Harvey's guitar and her voice, and those together are too beautiful for words.