FEATURE:
Down By the Water
PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love at Thirty
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RELEASED on 27th February, 1995…
IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in the studio in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Simon Fowler
PJ Harvey’s third studio album, To Bring You My Love, is almost thirty. Because of that, I thought it was worth writing about an album that stands tall with the very best of the '90s. It was recorded after the dissolution of the PJ Harvey trio; many consider this to be her first solo album. I guess it is. Important because of that at the very least. Co-produced with John Parish and Flood, there are some great guest musicians playing alongside Harvey and Parish. To Bring You My Love (Demos) came out in 2020 and is well worth investigating. I want to get to a few features/reviews about To Bring You My Love. I am starting out with The Quietus. Reviewing the album in 2020 to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, this piece works from the perspective that PJ Harvey was as much an actor as she was musician. So much drama and cinema through To Bring You My Love:
“By 1995, Harvey had spent a depressing amount of time debunking the assumption that her music was autobiographical. Many had figured that the brutal imagery of her 1992 debut, Dry, must have stemmed solely from real-life experience; the truth was that if you’d cut her open, she’d have probably bled greasepaint. It could be violent and disturbing, but she also played for murky laughs by deliberately sending up tired virgin-whore tropes, pivoting from a licentious other woman’s leer on ‘Oh My Lover’ to an ingenue’s clumsy breathlessness on ‘Dress’. And while her nervous breakdown gave Rid Of Me a bleak backstory, that album wasn’t a confessional outpouring either. As Judy Berman’s terrific reappraisal explains, its songs were about performances – the parts people were forced to play, or tried to challenge – as well as being stellar performances themselves. Sometimes Harvey became other characters, like Tarzan’s fed-up other half, or Eve venting her spleen at the serpent. Sometimes she adopted a terrifying alter-ego: her delivery on ‘50 Ft Queenie’ was, she said, inspired by the braggadocio of hip hop, a literally monstrous way of bigging herself up.
Harvey knew she had to throw herself fully into her ideas to pull them off. "If you write words like that and sing it in the wrong way, it’s a complete disaster," she told Rolling Stone. Her voice may have sounded like a force of nature, but focusing on its elemental power sold short her judicious precision, the way she manipulated it to do her bidding. When she told the LA Times her favourite singer was Elvis, they assumed she meant Costello because of their shared sense of musical ambition; she was actually talking about Presley, another artist who, like her, knew exactly how to use their primal talent. “I love his singing, the passion, the depth in his vocals,” she enthused.
But on To Bring You My Love, Harvey is less like either Elvis and more Marlon Brando: an actor with intense, chameleonic charisma, as tough, scary, heartbreaking or unnerving as each role demands, bringing the record’s desperate souls to life with her full-blooded, full-bodied portrayals. “I’ve lain with the devil, cursed God above,” she seethes over the title track’s sinister, serpentine guitar and eerie organ, full of such bitter longing that her voice shakes and trembles and sounds inhuman; when she rasps “I was born in the desert, I’ve been down for years”, she sounds like a hungrier, lustier incarnation of the rough beast from WB Yeats’ The Second Coming. On an album that explores how anyone can be unhinged by the all-consuming craving for sex, love, spiritual salvation and human connection, it’s the perfect transformation: a spurned admirer turned into an unearthly creature, dragging herself across the sand and bringing the apocalsypse with her.
Next, she brings a similarly demonic energy to ‘Meet Ze Monsta’ (which, like several songs, referenced another of Harvey’s idols, Captain Beefheart) and its netherworld stomp of sludgy, grungy riffs – only this time she adopts the tough-talking swagger of a larger-than-life prizefighter, like she’s looking the devil in the eye and refusing to back down from a scrap. “I see it coming at my head,” she taunts in a deep, defiant bark. “I’m not running, I’m not scared.” Then, for the uneasy chug of ‘Working For The Man’, she changes again, turning into a hushed, lonely figure driving down a dark highway in pursuit of love. “God is here being my wheel,” she murmurs, channelling the conviction of a zealot steeling herself for something awful.
Those first three songs alone have the range of a character actor’s showreel: three stories, three protagonists, three entirely different performances. As Harvey explained to the LA Times that year, she’d spent a lot of time honing her craft. “When I was young, I wrote plays,” she said. “And performed all the different characters when my parents’ friends would come over.” She approached records like To Bring You My Love with the same spirit, giving each character their own tale of rejection or ruinous obsession, and their own way of telling it. On the beautiful, bittersweet strum of ‘C’mon Billy’ she’s the personification of anguish, her wounded pleas catching in her throat as she begs her partner to return to their son. And then she spins that vulnerability completely on its head by playing another mother on the edge, only this time with a terrible secret.
‘Down By The Water’ still unfolds with the dramatic tension of a chilling one-woman play, the kind that makes your face blanch and stomach drop. Harvey’s narrator reels you in by hollering for her drowned daughter, although the the grubby, buzzing organ suggests something fouler at hand. Then comes the sucker-punch: the growing dread as you realise what she’s done, the sharp stab of cruel strings, her disturbingly fervid tone as she half-confesses, half-justifies her crime: “I had to lose her, to do her harm!” And when it finally ends, it’s not with a bang but a dreadful whisper: “Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water/ Come back here man, gimme my daughter.” Harvey’s delivery has the creepy cadence of a twisted nursery-rhyme, recited by a person so broken they’ve been driven to madness, or who thinks they can fix everything by chanting an incantation.
There were, Harvey wryly observed, some blinkered people who heard it and really believed she’d committed filicide. As she revealed to Rolling Stone, the reality was less gruesome: she knew how to use her own experiences for emotional fodder like a seasoned thespian, and also found it easy to imagine how other people must feel when they were suffering, too. Her interest in visual mediums like film – ‘50 Ft Queenie’, of course, owed a debt to the 1958 monster movie Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman – added to her work’s cinematic splendour. She wrote ‘Teclo’ after hearing Ennio Morricone’s ‘Teclo’s Death’, from his 1968 Guns For San Sebastián score. Her composition throbs with melodic instrumentation, and Harvey casts herself not as the titular Teclo but one of his mourners. “Just let me ride on his grace for a while,” she croons, summoning the doomy grandeur of someone singing a lonely elegy out in the moonlit plains – a finale worthy of any epic spaghetti western.
Then again, it’s easy to imagine most of these songs thudding out of cinema speakers, especially the rockier, rougher ones (and especially in 1995, when alternative bands were favourites on big-screen soundtracks: The Cure on Judge Dredd, Hole, Belly and more on Tank Girl, Juliette Lewis covering Harvey for Strange Days). The blistering, unholy din of ‘Long Snake Moan’ has the dank aesthetic of an underground action flick, with filthy riffs and blasts of noise that detonate like bombs, while Harvey snarls about drowning, ritual and resurrection like a mythical warrior queen on a power-and-pleasure trip. “It’s my voodoo working!” she crows at the end, as the ground cracks beneath her feet and the walls cave in.
Listening now, it can seem like Harvey would rather play anyone than herself on To Bring You My Love, and its cast of pointedly exaggerated, often abandoned female archetypes must have vexed anyone looking for real-life tidbits. Yet her supposedly autobiographical albums aren’t always much more revealing than the elaborate fantasies. Her 2000 LP Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea was tangibly rooted in her experiences in New York, London and Dorset. That title, though, also hinted at the way personal experience can be romanticised into narrative – at old memories being recast with the same extravagant gloss as Harvey’s lush melodies – and tracks like ‘You Said Something’ are both intimate and elliptical: it dances around a charged conversation between two people, capturing their shared electricity without ever divulging the discussion itself. Her ostensibly truest-to-life work, meanwhile, is 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, on which she documented trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington but felt curiously absent as a narrator, preferring to report what she saw rather than reflect on how it made her feel”.
Prior to getting to the third and final feature, I want to quote from this article from last year. They heralded a great reinvention from PJ Harvey. An album that is timeless and ageless. Perhaps she hit a peak here. In spite of all the brilliance that has followed from her, many consider To Bring You My Love to be her crowning achievement:
“In its fearlessness and imagination, To Bring You My Love was proof that PJ Harvey was built to last. Comparisons to giants like Patti Smith and her much-admired Captain Beefheart, were apt. Moreover, she’d split with her band at the end of 1993, and was now a solo artist. “I just wanted the experience of playing with different people, and didn’t want to feel tied in any way,” she explained in an interview on French TV.
The most significant benefit of going solo was being in charge of all creative decision-making. While U2 producer Flood might have helmed the recording sessions, the buck stopped with Harvey. One of her decisions was to open the album with the growling title track, whose first line, “I was born in the desert,” happened to be identical to the first line on Beefheart’s debut album.
A quarter of a century later, To Bring You My Love hasn’t aged, because its themes are ageless. Religion, sin, and nature are the touchstones; Jesus is called upon, and the devil often replies. The mothers, lovers, and voodoo priestesses in the songs would fit into any century. If any element ties the production to the 90s, it’s “Teclo,” a minor-chord creeper that could have come from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but that’s a one-off.
Harvey’s innate theatricality was ramped up on To Bring You My Love, helped by the infusion of fresh blood – consisting of John Parish, an old pal from her first band Automatic Dlamini, and Nick Cave collaborator Mick Harvey – that helped steer the album in a more experimental direction.
While the album is pretty heavygoing at times, Harvey engineered in some light relief, too. There’s a moment in the swamp-rocking “Meet Ze Monsta” when she bellows in faux-fear at the approaching “big black monsoon.” It’s even funnier in the demo – released with other previously unheard versions as a separate album – because rather than bellow she emits a campy shriek. On the spaghetti-Western-inspired closing track, “The Dancer,” her used-and-abandoned character tries to entice her man back by squealing “Ah! AH! Aaah!”
In a way, she never hit such wild heights again, but she’d already proved herself and didn’t need to”.
To end, I am heading back to 2015. Stereogum marked twenty years of To Bring You My Love. PJ Harvey would follow this album with the remarkable Is This Desire? in 1998. Still recording to this day, there is no doubt Harvey is one of our most important and consistent artists. Someone who has released so many influential and pioneering albums:
“Sonically, To Bring You My Love is a full about-face from Rid Of Me. Where that album had clanged and scraped, To Bring You My Love floated and sighed. Harvey had assembled a supporting cast that included Bad Seed Mick Harvey (no relation) and John Parish, the childhood friend who would become her musical consigliere in the years after. Where she’d once recorded with Steve Albini, she went with his aesthetic opposite here: Arena-goth guru Flood, who’d helped teach U2 to move and Nine Inch Nails to project. The album’s sound was as spare, in its way, as what Harvey had done on Rid Of Me. But this time she went for ominous throb, not punishing crunch.
To this day, I don’t know whether the buzzing groove on “Down By The Water” came from a synth pretending to be a guitar or a guitar pretending to be a synth. The sounds just blurred into each other that way. Everything was ornamental: Spanish guitar flourishes on “The Dancer,” sustained string-drones on “C’Mon Billy,” those Dead Can Dance plinks on “Down By The Water.” When Harvey needed to make hard rock, she absolutely could; “Meet Ze Monsta” and especially “Long Snake Moan” are absolute crushers, closer to Zeppelin than the Jesus Lizard or whatever. But she was more interested in taking blues sounds and ideas and pushing them deep into the uncanny — riding the guitar figure on the title track until it turned into a hypnotic mantra, or straight-up smothering every last sound on “I Think I’m A Mother” (even her own voice) until it sounded like it was about to suffocate.
All that arrangement and production served to highlight Harvey’s voice, which has never sounded better, before or since. Harvey is one of the all-time great rock singers because she brought all-conquering strength and soul-ripping vulnerability at the same damn time. She was a feminist icon simply by virtue of existing, and she tore men’s souls to shreds with her teeth on Rid Of Me. On To Bring You My Love, she’s singing about transcending — about moving beyond physical concerns, finding the place where love and desire turn mystical. There are moments where the you can feel the physical impact of her full-blooded wail on her voice: the avenging-angel roars on “Long Snake Moan,” the sex-yelps on “The Dancer.” More often, though, she sounds like a being out of time. That title track, which opens the album, starts out with silence, its rotating guitar figure emerging and getting louder and louder. Harvey sings the same words again and again, first in a monotonal mutter and building to a fevered howl: “I’ve lain with the devil / Cursed God above / Forsaken heaven / To bring you my love.” Every lyric on the album comes with that same mythic weight. And she doesn’t just sing those words. She makes you believe them.
Then and now, the song that crushes me the hardest is “Send His Love To Me,” with its camel-galloping-through-the-desert acoustic guitar thrum and Harvey’s searching desperation escalating eternally: “How long must I suffer / Dear God, I’ve served my time / This love becomes my torture / This love, my only crime.” It’s not a song about romantic love — or, at least, 15-year-old me didn’t hear it that way. It’s a song about longing, about needing something else, about that feeling where you simply cannot go on with your life as you’re living it right now. Harvey’s unnamed lover might be the conduit for those feelings, but they’re bigger than one man. When things were bad at home back then — and, without getting too personal, things at home were really bad right then — I’d retreat into my room in the basement, playing that song over and over, staring off into nothing. I don’t know if that song saved me, but it sure helped.
This is usually the point in these Anniversary pieces where I talk about an album’s enduring influence, about the impact that it left on the music that came after. I can’t do that here. Can you name a single album that built on the foundation of To Bring You My Love? A subgenre that it helped will into being? A culture that it reshaped? I can’t. It was a blip on the radar. It came and it went. This makes sense. When an album is channeling those sorts of energies, how can any other artist expect to step in and do anything even remotely comparable? Even Harvey never did again. She retreated further into the foggy ether on Is This Desire?, her next album, and then it was on to the next one, her restless spirit never staying long with one sound or persona. There might be a few echoes of the album’s darkness in something like EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints, but I honestly cannot think of another example of an album that does similar things”.
On 27th February, it will be thirty years since PJ Harvey released her third studio album. Perhaps her very best releases, I know there will be new inspection and discussion about To Bring You My Love. All these years later, it still sounds breathtaking. It just goes to show that, when it comes to PJ Harvey, there are…
NO artists quite like her.