FEATURE:
Second Spin
PJ Harvey - Is This Desire?
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THERE are a couple of reasons…
IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in 1998
why I am spotlighting PJ Harvey’s fourth studio album, Is This Desire? I think it may be her most underrated album. Whilst it did receive some acclaim upon its release, it is an album that still divides some. Not as celebrated as, say, Dry, or Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Is This Desire? arrived three years after the superb To Bring You My Love. That album is often ranked alongside some of the best of all time. Is This Desire? is a different beast compared to To Bring You My Love. It was recorded during a particularly difficult time in Harvey’s life. If some critics place the album low on their ranking of PJ’s Harvey’s discography, she herself has said in interviews how this is her favourite. This is the one she is proudest of. Harvey put her all and everything into each song. It really shows! Released on 28th September, 1998, it is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary soon. You can grab the album on vinyl and give it a new spin. If you have never heard the album, then I think it is a good investment. There is also an album of demos from Is This Desire? that is a steal at this price. That gives more context and contours to the album and how the songs developed. No PJ Harvey album is overlooked or receives average reviews. I feel Is This Desire? warranted more huge reviews and bigger acclaim than some afforded it in 1998. Maybe retrospective reviews have been fairer – as Is This Desire? is now considered a classic. I will get to a couple of the positive reviews for Is This Desire? soon.
I would suggest people read recent reviews with PJ Harvey, as she is someone still producing magnificent music. Her tenth studio, album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, was released this year to enormous praise and love. A hypnotic and angry album with moments of beauty and tenderness, I think that some were shocked by a bit of a change of pace and lyrical agenda on Is This Desire? compared to 1995’s To Bring You My Love. Twenty-five years after its release, Is This Desire? sounds incredible and moving. It is one of my favourite PJ Harvey albums. In 2021, Beats Per Minute examined the new reissue of Is This Desire? and the Demos edition. I think that some critics didn’t appreciate the full depth and brilliance of PJ Harvey’s masterpiece. It is an album that warrants fresh ears and examination in 2023:
“In early 1997, Polly Jean Harvey was gearing up to record the songs that would form the follow-up to her 1995 LP To Bring You My Love. Within a few weeks, she had given up on them. “I wasn’t in the right place,” she later told Q Magazine. “It was a low time for me so I put the brake on. I said, ‘I don’t want to do these songs while I am like this.’ When I came back to the songs in 1998, they changed quite a lot. An important part of the creative process is knowing when it is the right time. The songs weren’t ready and nor was I.”
More than two decades on, the album that became Is This Desire? is the latest entry in Harvey’s 2020-21 reissues campaign, with an accompanying album of demos to boot. Out of a period of darkness came one of the key records of Harvey’s career, a beautiful, strange, queasy work of art. Where Dry and Rid of Me made virtue of Harvey’s brutal guitar playing and abrasive style, To Bring You My Love began to complement her punkish ferocity with slow-burning gothic blues and unsettling, atmospheric production.
IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey performing on stage at Lowlands, Biddinghuizen, Netherlands, on 28th August, 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Niels Van Iperen/Getty Images
Is This Desire? takes it even further, replete with delicate production details, the songs rely as much on mood and texture (sometimes more so) than traditional structures. Of course the guitar is central, but so too are industrial drum machines, subtle electronics, mournful piano, and disquieting sub-bass. The effect is one to keep the listener off-balance; for every song of velvety, elegant beauty (“Catherine”) there’s another of claustrophobic desolation (“Joy”), and for an occasional verse/chorus jewel (“Angelene”) there’s an experimental mood piece (“My Beautiful Leah”).
Yet somehow they all work together. I have always thought of Is This Desire? as a collection of short stories with different but interlinked characters – there’s Angelene, “prettiest mess you’ve ever seen”; Catherine de Barra, who leaves the narrator’s heart “stinking”; St. Catherine who “liked high places, high up on the hill… a place for making noises like whales”; the cloistered Joy, who at “30 years old, never danced a step”; the troubled and absent Leah, whose last words were “if I don’t find it this time, then I’m better off dead.”
Harvey told The Sunday Observer that she “wanted to write for [her]self, about [her]self. Like someone looking in on me.” Perhaps these characters, as much bearing the influences of the literature she was absorbing (including the stories of Flannery O’Connor), are stand-ins for her own state at the time, metaphorical other selves.
Harvey has always made plain that a lot of her work is fiction – no she didn’t drown her daughter, for instance – but part of the dark beauty of Is This Desire? is how personal it sounds. She later said: “The years between ’95 and ’97/’98 was probably the hardest time of my life. That album came out of that period, so it was a very difficult album to make, quite a painful album to make, and still not one I can listen to very easily at all.”
To add to its personal impression, it’s also filtered through the atmosphere of her home county of Dorset and its landscape and culture, from the photos displayed in the artwork to the folklore of St Catherine’s Chapel as explored in “The Wind”. Dorset looms large, or rather, looms low”.
In 2018, Annie Zaleski, writing for Stereogum, provided a fascinating take on Is This Desire? for its twentieth anniversary. Someone who clearly understands and connects with PJ Harvey’s music, it is interesting how it is perceived today (or 2018) compared to twenty/twenty-five years previous:
“Everything about Polly Jean Harvey was a revelation when she emerged in the early ’90s. Her first two albums with the trio PJ Harvey, 1992’s Dry and 1993’s Rid Of Me, were both as raw and tender as a newly scraped knee, all electric guitar fury and abrasive vocals. In 1995, Harvey stepped out on her own with the solo effort To Bring You My Love, an austere marvel steeped in blues and folk that smoldered and seethed as it reached the Top 40 on the US album charts and spawned a #2 modern rock hit, “Down By The Water.” This trilogy established Harvey as a formidable voice on both gender stereotypes and sexual expression, a powerhouse unafraid of aggressively confronting (and then upending) conventions.
As the decade progressed, this heightened profile came paired with increasingly loud stage-whispers that she had an eating disorder, along with lingering misconceptions about her mercurial moods. “I’m a mad bitch woman from hell. I can’t get enough sex or blood!” Harvey said, somewhat facetiously, when asked in a 1994 Q interview if she knew how the public considered her. She certainly wasn’t the only woman in the ’90s to be flattened into a caricature (just ask her Q interview mates, Tori Amos and Björk, who were also often side-eyed with unflattering assumptions) but in Harvey’s case, the pigeonholing felt particularly pernicious.
Perhaps because she didn’t shy away from anger or sexuality — and was a young woman expressing anger, at that — her persona was scrutinized more closely. “On the first couple of albums, I was finding a voice for the first time to say an awful lot of stuff that was stored up inside me,” Harvey told The Times in 1999. “I was very young and confused, so yes, those early albums are very angry. I was exploring that and finding a way to express it, and thought there is joy and a vibrant energy there, too. But you get categorized and it becomes rigid, and it doesn’t allow you space to develop and grow.”
Released on September 28, 1998, Is This Desire? didn’t quite reach the chart peaks of To Bring You My Love in most countries. However, commercial success was somewhat beside the point: The album obliterated expectations and found Harvey wresting control of her own narrative. Is This Desire? represents the culmination of her carving out time for self-care, emotional growth, and intense reflection — and channeling this into the lyrics. “I wanted to write for myself, about myself. Like someone looking in on me,” she explained to The Observer in 1999.
In some cases, this took the form of metaphorical concern. The lyrics of “The Wind,” a song inspired by the hillside St. Catherine’s Chapel in Harvey’s hometown of Dorset, England, envision the titular saint ensconced in the place of worship, where she “sits and moans.” However, the last verse features a child wishing Catherine could have a husband — and although the real saint was said to be devoted to Christianity rather than earthly desire, it’s a sweet, empathetic gesture underscoring that the melancholic woman isn’t alone.
But the title track — on which a man asks a woman, “Is this desire, enough, enough/ To lift us higher? To lift above?” — crystallizes the album’s central lines of questioning. Possessing desire is one thing, but what are the complications of expressing this desire? And is desire alone enough of a sustaining force — or can it also be a tool of destruction? These are thorny questions with no easy answers. “The Garden,” for example, envisions the tale of Adam and Eve unfolding between two men instead, but even a romantic encounter doesn’t change how lost the protagonist feels. In this case, having a taste of forbidden desire isn’t enough. Yet “The River” describes a relationship scorched by conflicting, greedy wants; it’s a case of too much desire having a negative effect.
Is This Desire? is particularly moving when it articulates how complicated desire affects women. The protagonist of “A Perfect Day Elise” witnesses the suicide of a beloved; “Catherine” is from the point of view of someone spurned by (and deeply jealous of) the titular character; “Joy” is consumed by “her own innocence” and feels so hopeless she’d rather go blind than remain in her current state.
It’s poignant (and pointed) that so many of the women on Is This Desire? have names: These aren’t abstract embodiments of femininity or womanhood, but relatable characters who are in various states of emotional disrepair, unmoored by forces beyond their control. Anyone listening to Is This Desire? could be a Joy or a Dawn or Elise; in fact, these named women feel like metaphorical selves representing Harvey’s own traumatic journeys. Accordingly, her vocal performances channel these different personas. “Catherine” has a regal, velvet-trimmed tone; “The Wind” alternates between conspiratorial whispers and a soaring falsetto; and the bruising “A Perfect Day Elise” contains notes of panic.
The period that produced Is This Desire? also gave Harvey valuable insights into her own psyche. As she told The Observer in 1999, hearing the playback of the song “My Beautiful Leah” — starring a sadness-wrecked woman who feels she’d be better off dead than remain alone — in particular, shook her. “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.’ Because it was all so black and white, and life just isn’t black and white. I knew I needed to get help. I wanted to get help.”
She went into therapy and, at some point, also moved into the basement flat of a house owned by her bandmate and collaborator John Parish, and video and art director Maria Mochnacz. The gesture represented more than just goodwill: “They basically saved me,” Harvey admitted to The Observer. “I needed to be rescued, and I was.” She recalled writing songs for Is This Desire? in this subterranean space, which was dark and cloistered, and focused on the demos her flatmates liked the most.
Unsurprisingly, Is This Desire? also sounds very different from Harvey’s prior work. Although there’s no shortage of abrasive moments (e.g., distorted vocals on “No Girl So Sweet”), Harvey de-emphasizes guitars in favor of stormy electronic programming with roiling rhythms and skeletal keyboards. Her collaborators aid and abet these gothic-dark soundscapes: The sparse “Angelene,” which boasts brooding piano and funereal organ, was arranged by long-time Nick Cave associate Mick Harvey. Marius de Vries, fresh off his work on U2’s Pop and the Romeo + Juliet movie score, also contributed additional programming, notably on the witchy shuffle “The Wind,” which boasts reedy percussion and haunted house-creepy electronic effects”.
I have one more feature to bring in before getting to a review. Is This Desire? features a range of characters. These intriguing personas almost allow Harvey this license to break free from constraints and any emotional barriers. That might suggest an album that is not personal. Quite the opposite! Udiscovermusic. wrote about Is This Desire? last year:
Reading between the lines
“I was doing a lot of emotional work [when she began studio sessions in 1997],” she shared on an interview disc that accompanied Desire. Her self-reflection reached the point where she had to abandon the sessions for a while: “I just wanted to stop, and start looking at my life as Polly, rather than my life as a songwriter.” By the time recording resumed in spring 1998, she’d devised a way to convey “life as Polly” without the danger of completely exposing herself.
Little of Is This Desire? is written in the first person; instead, Harvey used short stories by favorite authors for source material, finding characters and situations that mirrored her own. For instance, Joy Hopewell, the heroine of Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People, was reimagined as the betrayed-by-her-man protagonist of the track “Joy,” and the lyric vibrates with anger: “Joy was her name, a life unwed/Thirty years old, never danced a step.” And God, is that mirrored by the music. Harvey’s bellowing anguish is matched in intensity by a bed of grinding electronic noise, while two tracks later on “No Girl So Sweet,” another wronged O’Connor character, from the story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, sets off a firestorm of guitar-synth distortion.
Adopting electronic soundscapes
Along with the shockingly bleak “My Beautiful Leah,” which melds electro-brutalism and emotional despair, these are the harshest examples of the electronic textures that define the LP as a whole. Harvey had opened herself to the possibilities offered by machine-made sounds after singing on the Tricky track “Broken Homes” (from the trip-hop pioneer’s 1998 album, Angels With Dirty Faces).
“Broken Homes” is pure, midnight-blue trip-hop, and a touch of that genre made its way onto Is This Desire?, most notably on the dreamy, Portishead-inspired “Electric Light.” Also dreamy in their own way are “The Wind” and “Catherine,” written as a pair to honor the martyred St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of unmarried women. A 14th century chapel in her name still stands on a hill in Dorset, near Harvey’s birthplace, and the whispering loneliness of “The Wind” precisely captures the chapel’s isolation, and the torment of Catherine’s thoughts as she awaits execution by the emperor Maxentius (“She dreamt of children’s voices/And torture on the wheel”). “Catherine,” meanwhile, is set to a percussive pulse that sounds like a languidly beating heart.
The two tracks are deeply shivery, but darkest of all is “My Beautiful Leah.” It’s so grim that when Harvey listened back to it she thought, “This is enough! No more of this! I don’t want to be like this. I knew I needed to get help,” she told The Guardian the following year.
A turning point
“Leah” proved a turning point. She began therapy while continuing to work on the record, and her growing understanding of herself crept onto Is This Desire?. She composed on a keyboard rather than her usual guitar, which affected her process: hunched over a small portable keyboard, she found herself writing “more thoughtfully.”
If her singing sounds different – purer, perhaps – it’s because, instead of making demos of every song at home, then re-recording the vocals in the studio, she transferred all the four-track demos onto a multi-track recorder and used the original vocals on the final versions. The demos for all 12 tracks have just been issued for the first time as a standalone LP, Is This Desire? – Demos.
Harvey has said she finds Desire both difficult to listen to and a source of great pride. Referring to its cast of identity-masking characters, she told the NME, “Whatever I’ve written all comes from inside me and my experience. Whether I write about that in another person’s name or my own, there’s a lot of me in there. Because I finally feel comfortable saying ‘I am Polly.’” More than 20 years later, it stands as the record that set Polly free from emotional bondage”.
I am going to end by starting midway through an incredible review from 2014. I think there was a lack of understanding from critics in 1998. Maybe feeling PJ Harvey had to sound a certain way or was being too over-emotional and weird. Rather than allow a female artist license to create what she wants, there was a sense that Harvey was unusual and angry. I would like to see some modern reviews reverse that assessment and actually shine a very positive light on Is This Desire?:
“The question mark at the end of the album’s title becomes more important with the next two songs, both of which deal with twisted desire. “My Beautiful Leah” is the song that apparently pushed PJ over the edge for a while, a tale of a woman engaged in the perpetual search to find either meaning in her life, someone authentic who genuinely needs her, or both. PJ plays the role of hapless male lover in search of Leah, a woman with “her lovely face twisted” who is likely suffering from a form of bipolar disorder. The narrator emphasizes her neediness (“She was always so needing”), indicating that Leah is a psychological black hole and that he is likely a co-dependent participant. Some people consider this drum-kit-and-dark-synth track the highlight of the album, and while I’m not sure about that, I think the sickness of the narrator is effectively portrayed. Even more disturbing to me is the album’s single, “A Perfect Day, Elise,” a song about an obsessive male who believes he owns Elise after one roll in the hay and kills her to prevent anyone else from ruining his perfect day. Part of me wishes that the swaying rock rhythm here had been used for a song about pure desire, but PJ’s choice does make the piece much more impactful.
The middle section of this album definitely qualifies as a heart of darkness, and the song “Catherine” deals with the ugliness of obsessive, unrequited desire. PJ identifies the object of desire as one Catherine De Barra, and I’ve read a few different theories of this person’s identity. The author of the book Disruptive Divas suggests that it might be one of two Catherines who lived the island of Barra in the lower Outer Hebrides, but even she concedes it’s a mystery. It’s not a bad theory, as the essence of Catherine is her unattainability, and the image of a distant island complements the image. The bass on this song has the feel of a feverish heart, the muffled soundtrack mirrors the inner dialogue, and PJ’s lyrics graphically depict the corroding bitterness that consumes the narrator:
Catherine De Barra, you’ve murdered my thinkin’
I gave you my heart, you left the thing stinkin’
I’d shake from your spell if it weren’t for my drinkin’
The wind bites more bitter with each light of mornin’
I envy the road, the ground you tread under
I envy the wind, your hair ridin’ over
I envy the pillow your head rests and slumbers
I envy to murderous, envy your lover
‘Til the light shines on me
I damn to hell, every second you breathe
The meaning of “Electric Light” is more obscure; it all depends on how you interpret the word “siren.” Is it the image of a beautiful woman surrounded by neon lights or is it the sound of the police siren responding to a reported rape? The first interpretation makes the narrator a lonely soul in a two-bit room in the heart of the city yearning for the woman’s image to come to life; the latter implies he’s a murderous rapist admiring his work. Either interpretation raises questions of the meaning and realization of desire: the kind that languishes in neglect and the kind that kills. The bass-dominated arrangement could support either—it’s an eerie, mysterious and very compelling piece.
Even more compelling is “The Garden,” a poem set over a slow funk beat enhanced by well-timed appearances of organ, piano and strings. The build in the arrangement is exceptional—the shift to single piano notes in the later verses introduces a sense of foreboding, and the long lyrical pause before the last recitation of “And there was trouble” turns the line into something close to hair-raising. The lyrics appear to describe two men meeting in the garden for a moment of man-to-man intimacy:
And he was walking in the garden
And he was walking in the night
And he was singing a sad love song
And he was praying for his life
And the stars came out around him
He was thinking of his sins
And he’s looking at his songbird
And he’s looking at his wings
There, inside the garden
Came another with his lips
Said, “Won’t you come and be my lover?
Let me give you a little kiss”
And he came, knelt down before him
And fell upon his knees
“I will give you gold and mountains
If you stay a while with me”
And there was trouble
Taking place
At this point, we’re not sure if the trouble is due to the illicit love, the strangeness felt by two newbies to the gay scene or what. In the last sequence, PJ throws a wrench into that interpretation:
They kissed and the sun rose
And he walked a little further
And he found he was alone
And the wind it gathered ’round him
Now we’re looking at the possibility that the man was meeting with his Jungian shadow, the part of the self that is repressed. What I realized that both interpretations could be simultaneously true, making this a marvelously constructed tale of repressed desire. When PJ is on her game, her lyrics are akin to the experience of walking past the mirrors of the fun house—there are multiple interpretations possible, depending on your perspective. People who detest ambiguity will feel uncomfortable with such a poet, but I find PJ’s work endlessly fascinating.
“Joy” combines more than a touch of Bjork with a Patti Smith vocal, a combination that is distinctly difficult to listen to. I think that’s the point: it’s hard for people to think about or even look at people with disabilities. PJ gives a credible performance in the role of a woman without hope or the ability to change her circumstances. Here she’s dealing with the impossibility of manifesting desire, the bitter truth of permanent virginity expressed in the phrase “Innocence so suffocating.” This terribly ugly (understandably ugly) song is followed by the melancholy beauty of “The River,” where PJ works with the imagery of baptism and the belief that one can “throw your pain in the river.” This is a fascinating song on many levels, for a superficial read could lead you to believe that PJ is talking about the empty promise of Christian baptism, but she could also be talking about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and the virtue of a life with no regrets. The image of washing is repeated here, indicating that the true theme of the song is probably closer to the guilt some people feel about desire itself. Again, whatever your interpretation, “The River” is a beautiful song and PJ’s natural voice, with its tone of weariness and doubt, is perfect for it.
“No Girl So Sweet” is the doppelgänger of “The River,” using the same chord combination but shifting to heavy electronics. This is the one song on the album that turns me off, probably due to its intensely Christian imagery. The album ends with the title track, also steeped in biblical references. The question posed here is whether or not desire can be transcendent, a question to which I would naturally respond, “Fuck yes!” I will admit that it is a question that has been debated for centuries, with Gautama coming down on the side of extinguishing desire and Blake on the side of letting it rip (“sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse an unacted desire”). I’m on Blake’s side; PJ is able to hold both truths simultaneously, and that’s why she’s the poet and I’m the admirer.
It’s regrettably understandable that the male-dominated field of music criticism didn’t get this album. The criticism that the album is “too sad” is such an obtuse perspective that it takes my breath away, but I’ve learned to accept male obliviousness as a fact of life. This is not to imply that all men have their heads up their asses, but our societies have a long way to go before they reach the tipping point where women are understood and accepted for who they are”.
A top twenty album in the U.K., I know there will be a lot of new spotlight and praise for PJ Harevy’s incredible Is This Desire? It is an album I remember back in 1998. Maybe not as big a fan of hers then as I am now, in years since, I listen to this album and feel it is as revelatory and extraordinary as anything she has ever produced! An album impossible to truly understand after one listen, this superb work is one that will continue to reveal layers and wonders…
FOR many years to come.
