PJ Harvey – ‘Uh Huh Her’
While Uh Huh Her is in no way PJ Harvey’s most well-known record, but in a lot of ways, it feels like her most quintessential work. As the musician took control of absolutely every element, it was a 14-track tour of her and her alone.
As ‘The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth’ comes to life, the record is captured in mere seconds with that chugging guitar. It’s at once both simple and dirty as if those chords are being dragged through the dirt as a perfect take on Harvey’s own brand of earthy punk. It doesn’t stray too far beyond that rolling guitar line, but it doesn’t have to. The instrumentation carries the lyricism in a way that’s both nesting and indicative. It doesn’t overcrowd or overpower the words to allow her sprawling lyrical story to hold the limelight, but for listeners who don’t want to focus in on that or be analysing words for meaning, the music alone tells the jagged tale.
That then remains as perhaps the only clear-through path on the album. As Harvey wrote, played, and produced the LP, the marriage between the emotional life of the words and of the music feels incredibly tight and cohesive. Sure, on all her albums, Harvey has always kept it very tight and neat in terms of the band, only inviting in a small handful of trusted and repeat collaborators. But Uh Huh Her is a complete solo effort, leaving a sense of all the handprints leaving the picture, letting it exist as a pure piece of PJ and only PJ.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a neat and clear album. Between ‘Shame’, ‘Who The Fuck?’ and ‘Pocket Knife’, it could be three different artists playing as Harvey moves between folk, punk, and rock over and over across the album. Sometimes, that can leave the listener feeling a bit thrown around as the vibe switches up so dramatically between tracks. In that way, the album does miss a common producer who would paint the songs with a somewhat uniform colour. But for fans of Harvey, Uh Huh Her feels like an undiluted tour of her artistic mind where the jumps between sounds are merely the various different landscapes and textures that exist within her.
The dedication to that and only that is what pushes the record forward. Throughout the process of writing that album, over the course of a two-year period in the privacy of her Dorset home, Harvey wrote notes to herself in a way that other collaborators might have provided insight or advice. “Too PJ H?” one read as if she was determined to break past the shape of PJ Harvey that the world knew. “Scare Yourself”, another read, acting as an instruction for tracks like the deeply revealing ‘The Darker Days Of Me & Him’. Or perhaps most important for the album, one note read, “All that matters is my voice and my story”.
That one note captures the energy of Uh Huh Her better than anyone else could. In many ways, it’s a deeply selfish outing as Harvey casts off all help or external input to instead make 14 songs based solely on her own inspiration and intuition. That accounts for the more frivolous interludes like ‘The End’ or the minute of bird noise on ‘Seagulls’. But on the flip side, it also created space for tracks like ‘The Desperate Kingdom of Love’, a soft and tender lyrical ode that feels like it would have been forced into a bigger or rockier shape on any other album. But here, it stays in the infantile origin it was clearly born as, with Harvey deciding to keep it as the little ditty she first heard it as in her mind.
Wherever her mind went, the album goes, too. For people on the outside, hitting play on the album can feel like a confused journey with no clear path, threatening to lose you. But for Harvey’s fans, that’s a treat, turning Uh Huh Her into a scattering of sounds and stylings that make up her signatures.
