by Sam Jennings (@Walt_Whitmensch)
PJ Harvey’s trajectory throughout the 90s was amazingly linear. Beginning with 1992’s spare, grungy Dry, every album consistently evolved that immediately recognizable Harvey style—dark, blistering, sexually voracious, more than a little coy, and self-confident to a fault—closer and closer towards something like an accessible pop version of itself. Of course, this has led plenty to argue that 1993’s Steve Albini-helmed Rid of Me was her real peak (I’d tend to agree—and recommend anyone wondering why watch the video for “Man-Size,” just to see what made Harvey so instantly unique and captivating). Soon enough, she’d traded trendy rock bona fides for a tour with Tricky, and picked up the industrial/trip-hop stalwart Flood to produce 1995’s To Bring You My Love and 1998’s Is This Desire? There’s a ton to admire in those albums—Love is an aesthetic dream, all thundering bass and dark clouds and PJ blues, and the increasing electronic touches and beats-over-guitars approach of Desire? are grand late-90s time-capsule material.
All this to say that when Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea arrived in 2000, it did so as the nexus of any number of narratives that had been building to that point. For all of the (increasingly mainstream) believers, it was Harvey’s first really “mature” album, the apex of her ability as a songwriter, wherein all the shadow and sex of her music finally erupted into defiant Y2K apocalypticism (probably why it won the Mercury Prize in 2001, an award she famously accepted on September 11). Or else it was the culmination of what the naysayers had claimed all along: she’d finally sanded away all those wonderfully rough edges, leaving her songs—whose main virtues had always been a punishing musical directness and thematic obsessiveness—in a kind of AOR limbo.
For the ever-sober and self-contained Harvey, however, Stories was only ever about a return to the simplicity of writing towards “songs” rather than “sounds”. Taken with this in mind, UMC/Island’s vinyl reissue of the album (along with a collection of unreleased demos) is perfectly placed to show how none of the narratives of its time really did the record justice. If you are—like me—ultimately a fan of Harvey the Aesthete, 50-Foot Queenie of a transcendent grunge catharsis, a woman who took to the Tonight Show stage with only her guitar to command an unprepared American audience to lick her injuries, you’ll likely find the record to be missing something. It is indeed a very slick album, with some of the tracks threatening to evaporate into banal millennium rock.
Yet twenty years later, it can clearly be seen to contain several of her greatest songs. Opener “Big Exit” is a rush, with Harvey characteristically greeting the end of the world feeling immortal. One of two duets with Thom Yorke, “Beautiful Feeling,” makes quite literal the influence of Radiohead’s atmospherics on the album’s production, while “We Float” essentially creates the entire template for Lana Del Rey’s croon a decade later. The most brilliant of all is the penultimate track, “Horses in My Dreams,” which accomplishes the entire record’s purpose in five minutes: her voice is devastating, a specter of history, crumbling, singing, “I have pulled myself clear.” It’s astonishing, laying out the exhausted march of the oncoming millennium with a clarity that’s only gained in sadness and beauty in the twenty years since. The album is worth revisiting for these moments alone, let alone as part of the fascinating progression of one of the most admirable and influential artists of the past thirty years.