On “Catherine,” the sixth song on Is This Desire?, there’s something off about Polly Jean Harvey’s voice. It’s a bit deeper than usual, as if it’s been pitch-shifted to a lower register, a tone intended to match the character of the narrator in the song, which is an unnamed man. He observes the song’s subject from a distance, his feelings of lust and infatuation growing from dangerously obsessive to simply dangerous: “I envy the road, the ground you tread under/I envy the wind, your hair ridin’ over… I envy to murderous, envy your lover.”
The Catherine that Harvey references in the song is loosely modeled after Saint Catherine, who rebuked the emperor Maxentius for his cruelty, and who was subjected to torture and eventually execution. When she was beheaded, a milky white substance flowed from her neck rather than blood. She’s also the namesake of a chapel in Harvey’s home of Dorset, England, which forms the backdrop of another song on Is This Desire?, “The Wind.” Alongside Catherine, Harvey introduces a number of other characters we come to know through first names only: Joy, Leah, Angelene, Elise. And nearly all of them eventually meet some form of tragedy, loss, pain or cruelty.
Even in a catalog that’s touched upon everything from sex as body horror to the horrors of war, PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? is a staggeringly dark album. In the year following the release of her 1995 album To Bring You My Love, Harvey collaborated with Nick Cave on “Henry Lee,” a grim and beautiful standout from his 1996 album Murder Ballads, and in the process they fell in love, entering into a brief but intense relationship that ended when Harvey herself called it off. But in its aftermath, they each went through their own period of grieving, Cave funneling those emotions into an album of love songs, The Boatman’s Call, while Harvey embarked on a more personal project that saw her confronting her most harrowing emotional impulses. An infamously unknowable person, Harvey’s spent over 30 years keeping press and the public at guitar neck’s length, sharing few details about this period other than acknowledging that struggle. But it’s unmistakable when you hear it on record—pain is universal.
Its songs are alternately delicate and menacing, wrapped in ornate flourishes but gnarled and noisy at their core.
Where Harvey’s previous albums blurred the line between the personal, the allegorical and the absurd, Is This Desire? is written more explicitly from an interior lens, but channeled through character sketches informed by sainted martyrs and Southern gothic literature. None of the women that appear throughout the album are named Polly, but they’re all proxies for the very real feelings of depression that overcame her as she began writing. These women aren’t PJ Harvey, and yet all of them are.
In the opening line of the elegantly bluesy “Angelene,” Harvey introduces herself and the title locutor as “the prettiest mess you’ve ever seen,” and that pretty well summarizes the album as a whole, the most gorgeously devastating piece of work she’s released to date. Its songs are alternately delicate and menacing, wrapped in ornate flourishes but gnarled and noisy at their core. Where once she perfected a kind of serrated and ferocious guitar rock that you could have kinda-sorta called “grunge,” but with a more unhinged potency, here she scales back the fuzz pedals in favor of mutant synths, gothic keyboards and a kind of dreamlike shimmer. It’s an album that sometimes feels elaborate, but the songs frequently only comprise a few sparse elements.
“Generally the songs are very simple, terribly simple,” she said on an interview disc released in conjunction with the album. “There’s not a lot going on in them other than my voice and my emotion.”
Is This Desire? is her most polarized album, nearly every song taking shape as both Jekyll and Hyde. There are two specific reasons for this. Like every album she’s written to date, Is This Desire? began as a series of demos that Harvey recorded on her own, but rather than re-record them in full, those demos formed the backbone of each of these songs, and as such a song like “My Beautiful Leah” can sound both rough and unfinished in its opening splatter of synth and drum machine and somehow richly layered as it reaches its grim conclusion. The other reason is that Harvey, in the grips of her own depression, had to stop working on it for her own sake. She went to therapy and credited collaborator John Parish and art director Maria Mochnacz with “saving” her, and has explained that the romantic notion of pain being fuel for creativity is a misnomer—at her lowest, she struggled to do much of anything. And what she did create often spiraled downward in such a way that even she found it hard to take.
“My Beautiful Leah” is, once again, illustrative here, its central figure a woman who “only had nightmares” and whose “sadness never lifted.” But Harvey saves its bleakest statement for its pitch-black conclusion: “It never leaves my mind/The last words she said/ ‘If I don’t find it this time/Then I’m better off dead.’”
“I listened back to that song and I thought ‘No! This is enough! No more of this! I don’t want to be like this,’” she said in a 1999 interview with The Observer, recalling the moment that she realized just how precarious her own situation had become.
While the palette and Harvey’s outlook changed on Is This Desire?, what didn’t change was how visceral much of the material was. PJ Harvey’s never made the same type of record twice in a row, and arguably twice ever—though she does return to some familiar motifs—but she’s never made anything passively or ignorably pleasant. Even 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, her most polished set of songs, is at turns horny and deranged, whether she’s admiring an undressed lover or expressing the desire to feel the cold steel of a firearm in her hands. Is This Desire? is no exception to this rule, even when it occasionally indulges in actual pop songs.
“A Perfect Day Elise,” the first single released from Is This Desire?, is ostensibly the least dramatic pivot from the bluesy moan of To Bring You My Love, perhaps the most accessible song here but still jet black and teeming with ghosts. It rides a downtuned riff that sounds just slightly, perfectly out of tune and rises up into a climactic chorus. But “Elise” introduced the album to listeners with a jaw-droppingly bleak image, the titular Elise witnessing the suicide of her partner, who “let himself in room 509/said a prayer, pulled the trigger and cried.”
Much as she adopted different names through which to outwardly direct the storm roiling inside her, Harvey similarly experimented with different sounds in the process. She boldly challenged herself and listeners through songs primarily written on keyboards and synths rather than noisy guitars, which by that point had become her signature. “Joy” is one such product of that pivot in songwriting, the album’s most cacophonous song with clanging industrial percussion and bass that rattles and distorts as it hits its lowest note, a frequency that feels like a machine dismantling itself or interior panels of a mid-sized sedan shaking loose. It’s inspired by a character in a Flannery O’Connor story, a tragic figure with a prosthetic limb and “A life unwed/Thirty years old/Never danced a step.”
Elsewhere she dials back the noise and indulges in pop so airy and tactile it becomes something like music as ASMR. One such song is “Electric Light,” the aural equivalent of seeing someone’s face lit by candlelight in pitch blackness, comprising little more than a barely audible organ bassline and Harvey’s voice as a subtle patter of drums slowly emerges. “The Wind” is a bit richer in its presentation, twinkling to life with a chiming vibraphone, then in slowly rushes a trip-hop pulse and elegant flourishes at the fringes, like wah-wah guitar and strange metallic interruptions. Harvey introduces “Catherine” here, verses spoken in a whisper about her solitary life in the chapel (“Catherine liked high places, high up, high up on the hills, a place for making noises”) and a wish for her to find a companion. But it’s less the content than the effect of it all that, gentle as it is, leaves the greatest impact, Harvey even affecting a “whooooosh” sound that might cause a tingly feeling if you’re susceptible to said sensory response.
But then some songs on Is This Desire? are just jaw-droppingly gorgeous, like “The Garden,” which carries a simple but sinister, slow-burning groove and climaxes with a flourish of stark piano notes. “The River,” another song inspired by a short story by Flannery O’Connor, is one of Harvey’s most ominously beautiful songs, bound by a repeating piano arpeggio and an ethereal air of tragic beauty undercut by a serrated undercurrent of guitar and elevated with the stoic blare of trumpet. While much of the album sounds like demos being rebuilt into a finished product in real-time, these are simply perfect.
There aren’t many songs throughout Is This Desire? that actually opt for a brighter view, but “The Sky Lit Up” is one of them. A skronky, squealing rock song that arrives like a more scuffed up version of the songs she’d include on Stories from the City, it maintains the glamour without as much of the seaminess: “I’m walking in the city tonight… And this world tonight is mine.” It’s only in the closing title track that she asks what all this anguish—the inevitable fallout, trials and tribulations of love and lust—is really worth: “Is this desire/enough, enough/To lift us higher/To lift us above?” She ends the song on the title question, left unresolved, one that her next album would seemingly answer in the affirmative, but only while acknowledging that its complications are inevitably part of the deal.
I can’t remember if I bought Is This Desire? on the same day that I also picked up Rid of Me, but it was almost certainly the same week, and despite the vast differences in aesthetic, even then they struck me as similar in ethos, juxtaposing thunderous walls of sound against hushed moments of uneasy tension. I played the hell out of both of them in the winter of 1998 and ‘99 in my blue Honda Civic, which was stolen and shortly thereafter found gutted of its engine parts a decade later, but where Rid of Me entered constant rotation, Is This Desire? could only be played at night. And even now it doesn’t seem right to hear it on a sunny, summer afternoon. It calls for gray skies and trees stripped of their foliage, a rhythmic patter of raindrops sequenced in time with the delicate piano of “The Garden” and “The River.”
Is This Desire? only sold about half as many copies as its predecessor, but it sounds ageless more than two decades on, losing nothing in the way of its strange beauty or lyrical potency since it was released in 1998. That’s essentially true of everything she’s released, including albums like 2007’s skeletal and chilling White Chalk, which itself received perhaps her chilliest reception when it was released but now feels like a necessary bridge between this album and last year’s I Inside the Old Year Dying. It’s held up best for Harvey herself, who told the Telegraph that it’s the “best record I ever made—maybe ever will make—and I feel that that was probably the highlight of my career,” even if its creation was at times to her own personal detriment. There’s little comfort in its expressions of anguish and the heavy questions it seems unable to answer, but as a rare moment of genuine vulnerability, it provides its own kind of solace.
PJ Harvey : Is This Desire?
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