Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea [Explicit Lyrics]

This LP marks a major musical progression for Ms. Harvey. Like her early albums, these songs are built around the three-piece band dynamic of guitar, drums and bass; but this time around she adds lush layers of melody and reverb by bringing subtle shades of keyboard, E-Bow, accordion and harpsichord into the mix. The resulting sound is rich, graceful, tuneful and quite unlike anything she’s done before.

Big Exit kicks off the album in glorious, psychedelic, hard-rocking style. It opens with a wall of bellowing loudspeaker vocals, clattering Led Zeppelin drums and staccato electric guitars before melting into a swooning chorus of “Baby baby ain’t it true/I’m immortal when I’m with you”. The second song Good Fortune is a joyous, romantic, violent Bonnie and Clyde fantasy in which she dreams of going on the run and living a dangerous gypsy existence with her lover. It soon becomes clear that she is celebrating a new type of romantic love and positive energy on this record. Having covered darker territory throughout her career, she enjoys playing with Beatlesque guitar pop and delicate orchestration on songs like A Place Called Home, One Line, This Mess We’re In and the ethereal closer We Float. These are soaring, poignant songs of hurt and hope. Beautiful Feeling and Horses in My Dreams are unplugged ballads of raw, stark beauty. In contrast, at least five songs (Big Exit, The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore, Kamikaze, This Is Love and bonus track This Wicked Tongue) are as tough, fierce and hard-rocking as anything off Dry or Rid of Me.

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea won the Mercury Music Prize, two Grammy nominations, two BRIT nominations, appeared on numerous album-of-the-year polls and prompted Q magazine to vote PJ Harvey the greatest female rock star of all time. For all the critical praise, it met an unusual reaction from some longtime fans. Grumpy doom-and-gloom miserabilists who favoured her darker early work seemed to cynically begrudge Harvey her new-found happiness on this record, and indie snobs felt put out that their “dirty little secret” was now being enjoyed by a wider audience. This has happened to every great rock act who has dared to edge from underground cult worship to mainstream success, from Pixies and Sonic Youth to White Stripes or Queens of the Stone Age. She certainly hasn’t gone soft by any means. The fiery spirit, emotional intensity and musical passion are all still there; the heart beats stronger than ever before.

This magnificent album demands to be heard by as many people as possible.

The result of this is that now I have my car back the only CDs as yet available are those in the little rack thing hooked round the driver's sun visor, which I had forgotten all about. And the only thing worth listening to in there (even though I put every CD there at some point) is PJ Harvey's album 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea', which I had always dismissed as being a bit too straight up and down rocky to be a good PJH LP.

However, given the choice of listening to 'not at her best' PJ Harvey or, to take a random example of the other CDs available, a Graham Nash live bootleg from 1993, well I've had PJH on the car CD player pretty much constantly for the past week or so.

And it's a truly great album - possibly her very best which really is saying something. From the exultant semi-shout "I'm immortal when I'm with you" in album opener 'Big Exit' to the haunting refrain on the second from last track, 'We Float' ("We float/Take life as it comes"), this is a confident album from an artist at the top of her game.

Where once she asked 'Is this Desire?', now she states 'This is Love'. Which is a pointer to the fact that this is a much happier album than we're used to from Polly Jean. Not that it's exactly the Crazy Frog tune or anything, but it's a long way from 'Plants and Rags' on her first album ("Plants and rags/Ease myself into a bodybag") to this album's 'Beautiful Feeling' ("A smile from San Diego/He's still a boy/Two ends to every rainbow/And a train from Mexico"). 'Good Fortune' continues the positive vibe and even the Thom Yorke duet, 'This Mess we're In", manages to be less than morose (although not a patch on Yorke's earlier duets with Drugstore or Bjork).

For old time fans, the spiky guitar and the confrontation is still there, though - any album with a track called 'The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore' isn't likely to crack the core pre-teen market - but there's a happiness behind it which too often seemed missing in her earlier work. Even the tracks which ostensibly sound like they could be expected to be on the negative or sleazy side often turn out to carry you along on an upbeat guitar line or an unexpected Polly Jean wail (see especially the ending of 'the Whores Hustle' for a wonderful example of Ms Harvey's Yma Sumac-like vocals).

And then, just when you think that the old evil Polly is gone, along comes 'This Wicked Tongue Says', a barely produced burst of pure invective, as Polly curses everyone over almost, but not quite, out of control guitar. This is a track that could fit onto 'Dry' without a problem.

Stand out track for me in an album full of potentials, though, is 'Kamikaze', which is so good that I'm banned from playing it in the car when there's anyone else present, lest I take my hands off the wheel to play the drum rolls on the steering wheel and end up involved in a road traffic incident.

Which is where we came in...