SOME PJ HARVEY (TO SOOTHE YOUR SOUL)

I’ve been listening to PJ Harvey’s music for thirty years now. There are ten albums (I would have guessed quite a few more than that) and I know every one of them well. They’re all exciting, but always in different ways. There is always the temptation for an artist to return to what has worked before, to what is most likely to pay the bills. To haunt the familiar rainy streets with their usual splashes of wet neon. But PJ Harvey doesn’t do that. Her sound and her music have evolved determinedly for three decades, like a fierce torrent cutting into rock, and and have along the way become prettier, more sad, more philosophical. The title song from the latest album marks a new high-water (low-water?) mark for both prettiness and sadness. I am reminded not so obscurely of The Cure’s Faith. And I like very much this animated short film in which a thinly sketched character seeks out space and woodsy solitude, but also companionship, meaning, and fire.