by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
PJ Harvey, the shape-shifting singer-songwriter from Dorset, was just a teenager when she joined her first band, Automatic Diamini, in 1988 alongside future collaborators, John Parish and Rob Ellis. 35 years later, Harvey has assembled an impressive body of work – nine studio albums under her own name, triumphantly reissued throughout 2021 and 2022, plus multiple singles, collaborative projects, live sessions, and soundtracks. Despite her prolific output, the PJ Harvey archives still boasted plenty of rare and previously unreleased material to spare, enough to fill the 6xLP box set. B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, released late last year to the delight of hardcore PJ Harvey fans, is all the evidence one needs to crown PJ Harvey one of the greatest songwriters of her generation.
If reinvention is a virtue, Harvey is a saint. The box set presides over three plus hours of archival material, featuring PJ Harvey from every era, every style, and in every persona. Long-time followers of PJ Harvey will recognize this important distinction; her ability to transform herself places Harvey in the rarified air as one of music’s true masterminds. Nearly every PJ Harvey album manifests a different auditory and lyrical chimera. This is not to say Harvey is a chameleon – never does she disappear into her surroundings; she’s the 50-ft queenie ruling the kingdom.
No matter the lyrical content or the sonics, Harvey’s singular voice in unmistakable. What continues to amaze is her ability to use her singular voice to accomplish myriad things. The “I” of PJ Harvey songs is rarely, if ever, her. Instead, each song gives the listener an intimate glimpse into a different character. The experience of listening to a PJ Harvey album is akin to reading a book of short stories. It’s voyeuristic, sensual, inclusive – just with a much better soundtrack. As such, the boxset found it instructive to separate these album personas chronologically. It’s one reason why the vinyl or CD edition of B-Sides, Demos & Rarities far surpasses the utility of the streaming version. The value of this collection lies not just in the songs, but the context, which is largely absent if you’re listening through an app.
Disc One features demos from the PJ Harvey “band” persona. Her early career found the young guitarist/songwriter fronting a classic trio, backed by bassist Steve Vaughan and drummer Rob Ellis. This is the most straightforward “rock” sounding of her personas, highlighted by the Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me, the critically acclaimed album that cemented Albini’s raw production aesthetic and made PJ Harvey an underground sensation. It was Albini’s work on Rid of Me at the legendary studio Pachyderm that would later catch the ear of Kurt Cobain.
While this early persona may be the least represented on the boxset – mostly because many demos from her first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me, were already released as the 4-Track Demos album in 1993 – it still features new discoveries. The demo for “Missed” and “Me-Jane” are previously unreleased as is the cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61,” Disc One’s standout track. What’s immediately evident from listening to these early demos is the power of Harvey’s voice and her razor-sharp songwriting, both of which appear preternatural. She seems to have emerged as a songwriter fully formed. Yes, it’s true that any artist worthy of a boxset – as Harvey certainly is – is the subject of mythologizing. Still, it’s astounding how great she was from the get-go. What these demos lack in sonic punch when compared to her early band recordings is overcome by the force of her presence. Captivating, intoxicating, and immediate, the essence of PJ Harvey is like the Platonic ideal, absolute and eternal.
Disc Two begins with material culled from the period after the PJ Harvey trio disbanded in late ‘93. The cocksure, lovesick, psych-western persona of To Bring You My Love reflects an artist’s insecurity of going it alone, despite To Bring You My Love reuniting Harvey with former bandmate John Parish, a paring that has persisted for much of Harvey’s career. The lusty overcompensation of Disc Two is salacious in all the right ways, epitomized by the boxset’s lead single “Somebody’s Down, Somebody’s Name” and the sparse “Darling Be There.” 90s fetishizers will relish the inclusion of “Naked Cousin,” Harvey’s banger that appeared on the era-defining The Crow: City of Angels soundtrack in ’96.
“Losing Ground,” B-side to the single “That Was My Veil,” is perhaps the most enlightening in terms of Harvey’s artistic headspace at the time. Over a blown-out drum loop and a fuzzy keyboard reminiscent of Electro-Shock Blues-era Eels, Harvey drawls, “Everything I do has been done before.” This is, of course, what every artist trafficking in the avant-garde fears, but in Harvey’s case, she couldn’t be further from the truth. There simply is no one else like her. When she sings “Who will love me now,” the answer feels self-evident. It’s everyone.
It's hard to pinpoint a specific quality to the legion of voices Harvey inhabits on Disc Three. Taken from the era of Is This Desire? – her dark, despondent opus of 1998 – and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – her 2000 megawatt return to arena rock stylings – these songs are meaty yet obscured, hi-def but with the tone knob rolled back. “Sweeter than Anything” is haunting in its hushed delivery, contrasted by the aggressive 4-track demo of “The Faster I Breathe, the Further I Go,” whose kiss-off guitar riff is so down-tuned you can nearly hear the strings flailing against the fretboard. “The Wicked Tongue” sounds very much the outtake of Stories that it is, featuring similar vocal production and a sense the song desires to be played at extreme decibels. To call it anthemic slightly misses the point; Harvey is perpetually fucking with the formula. If you’re getting what you expect, you’re probably not listening closely enough.
Disc Four continues with songs from the early 2000s, Stories-era into Uh Huh Her, which saw Harvey pivot to a lo-fi recording aesthetic that would persist through 2007’s White Chalk, on which Harvey abandons all sense of rock music entirely, opting to soundtrack her unsettling chronicles of ghostwomen and mythic sirens with piano and autoharp. “As Close as This” is the highlight here, a B-Side from Stories that crackles with spectral energy. It’s the song equivalent of a banshee roaming the fog-choked landscape outside Great Linford Manor, where the song was recorded. “I’m hopelessly DE-vote-ted” Harvey coos over ritual drums and reverberating bells.
A curious aftershock of the Uh Huh Her era, explored on side B of Disc Four, is the lack of previously unreleased material. Here, the B-Sides are gleaned mostly from demos of songs appearing on album or from pervious eras. Whether this reflects a shortage of extraneous songs or an ebb in her songwriting is unknown. What is clear is that all the best songs of the era arrived on the album, with the outtakes presented serving more as compendiums than cannon. “97°” – which opens Disc Five – is the notable exception despite being fairly reminiscent of Uh Huh Her's “The Letter.”
The demos from Disc Five suggest a simmering violence Harvey would continue to explore on White Chalk, Let England Shake, and her most recent album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, which she partly recorded in a museum, inviting museum goers to observe her and her band creating the album. What’s impressive of her later work is how nearly indistinguishable the non-album tracks are from the finished output. “The Big Guns Called Me Back Again” could easily have made Let England Shake as could “The Nightingale.”
American audiences generally find this persona – the wandering bard traversing the English countryside singing parables of warning – challenging to square with the artist who thrilled with such heavy hitters like “Rid of Me” and “Man-size” thirty years ago. The aggression is still present in these tunes, it’s just focused outward. As she’s grown in her dystopic assessment of the Western world, Harvey no doubt recognizes the unsustainability of a system built on the whims of warmongering capitalists. Rather than rage over D-tuned guitars and pulverizing drums, Harvey has morphed into the Dylan-esque observer. The critique is every bit as eviscerating, even as the music sounds plucked from a quieter time and place.
The sixth and final disc collects Harvey’s most recent work, assembled from demos and various soundtracks like the massively popular television shows Peaky Blinders and All About Eve. Her fascination with traditional English folk music remains, best showcased on the gorgeous “An Acre of Land.” As the theme from Dark River, a 2017 British drama that explores the crumbling world of modern farming and the people desperately holding on to a disappearing way of life, the song aches in a way no PJ Harvey song has before, a territorial longing summoned from deep within the earth.
The timing of Harvey’s B-Sides, Demos & Rarities is tea-leaf perfect. PJ Harvey remains as influential today as she was in the ‘90s. Listen to Torres, Uh Huh Her, The Kills, King Hannah, Rid of Me, or Nilüfer Yanya’s recent cover, and you’ll hear direct lineage to Harvey’s singular voice and style. Yet the perennial polymath can’t slow down. Harvey released a book of poetry and photography with photographer and frequent collaborator Seamus Murphy, The Hollow of The Hand, for which she spent weeks in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington D.C. documenting places affected by war. Just last year she released a book-length narrative poem, Orlam, and announced a new album arriving this summer.
From 30,000 feet, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities – in conjunction with the reissue campaign and vinyl releases of demos from each album – is a legacy-cementing collection for obsessive fans, the type that many casual fans ignore. That’s okay, but if the casual fan or first-time listener did choose to begin with B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, they’d discover what makes this release different than other rarities collections: Listening to B-Sides, Demos & Rarities provides the listener with a complete picture of PJ Harvey the artist. The Man-eater, the Natural Born Killer, the Jilted Lover, the Spectral Medium, the Bard, the Punk, the Social Critic – it’s all here, in one place. It’s a helluva listen.