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Pj Harvey
During the early-'90s alternative rock explosion, several female singer/songwriters rose to prominence, but few were as distinctive or as widely praised as Polly Jean Harvey. Over the course of three albums, Harvey established herself as one of the most individual and influential songwriters of the '90s, exploring themes of sex, love, and religion with unnerving honesty, dark humor, and a twisted theatricality. At the outset of her career, she led the trio PJ Harvey, who delivered her stark songs with bruisingly powerful, punkish abandon, as typified by her 1992 debut, Dry. Following the noisy, uncompromising follow-up Rid of Me, the trio fell apart, and PJ Harvey became the sole property of Polly Harvey. Her next record, 1995's To Bring You My Love, became her mainstream critical breakthrough, confirming her status as one of the cornerstone figures of '90s alternative rock.
Are they a band or just one woman, a Miss Polly Jean Harvey? Why not ask former drummer Robert Ellis or bassist Stephen Vaughan, who both appear on the band efforts, Dry and Rid Of Me? At this point, it's pretty clear it's just Polly Jean. This English singer with the dark haunted looks became quite the toast of the critical town with To Bring You My Love, her third album (or fourth, if you consider a collection of demos a real album).
What Harvey does isn't all that earth-shattering. She's an adept lyricist who, taking cues from Captain Beefheart and Nick Cave (and therefore, by extension, Leonard Cohen ) employs Biblical sex and death struggles with blues riffs and carefully resculpted arrangements that emphasize the material's dramatic flair. That she shows no penchant for melodicism has not hindered her powers as a charismatic, if silly, performer.
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Artist Biography - Pj Harvey
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 Dry, her debut, enjoys the sharp-edged dynamic of her original band, who push Harvey to play excited rhythm guitar over her "controversial" lyrics about sexual identity and such. The band teamed up with noted "recorder" (he rightfully shuns the term "producer") Steve Albini for the second album, Rid Of Me. As typical of Albini's methods, the vocals are lost in the barrage of metallic drums and ugly guitar. Albini's trademark lack of audio compression ensures the soft parts are inaudible and the loud parts lack any punch. Apparently, Polly Jean had similar thoughts, since she felt obliged to release 4-Track Demos, her drummerless recordings of the same material and a few other tracks that failed to make the record. By the time of To Bring You My Love, she'd fired the band and began working with producer Flood, known for his work with U2, Daniel Lanois, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. The result was a sonically more rewarding album.
Following a tour that strove for the sumptuous terror of Dracula but more often ended up closer to the kitsch theatrics of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Harvey teamed with guitarist John Parish on a 1996 collection of arty song fragments, Dance Hall At Louse Point. On her next release under the PJ Harvey name, 1998's Is This Desire?, she continued to work with Parish and Flood, as well as reuniting with drummer Ellis. Soundwise, the album was more "electronic" than her previous work, but the lyrical obsessions remained the same, just a bit more tiresome.
Two years later, Harvey reunited with Ellis and Mick Harvey for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which returned to her earlier, more aggressive style and was inspired by her six-month stay in New York City in 1999.
The album won the 2001 Mercury Prize, making Harvey the first female winner of that award. After extensive touring in support of the album, Harvey split her time over the next two years working on new material and collaborating like-minded friends and contemporaries. Appearing on Gordon Gano's Hitting the Ground, Giant Sand's Cover Magazine and John Parish's How Animals Move, Harvey's most prominent collaboration was with the Queens of the Stone Age side-project The Desert Sessions. She performed on more than half of 2003's Desert Sessions, Vol. 9-10, including the single Crawl Home. That summer, she also performed at the V Festival, previewing tracks from her new album, which she said was close to being finished. The album, Uh Huh Her, appeared in summer 2004, coinciding with another string of tourdates, including British and European festival appearances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, the Montreux Jazz Festival and Spain's La Primavera festival. Stateside, Harvey joined the revived Lollapalooza festival for select dates, joining Morrissey and Sonic Youth on the main stage.
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For more information , enjoy the official homepage of PJ Harvey
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