With PJ Harvey playing every instrument on this album except the drums, it is tempting for me to give Uh Huh Her the nickname 12-Track Demos. At the beginning these comparisons are even more overt, with tracks like “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” and “Who the Fuck?” sounding bar one or two production choices similar in style and content to songs found on Dry or Rid of Me. It’s the kind of move that would make some more eager music journalists write on their notepads “return to form.”
But then Uh Huh Her shows itself to be a different beast. Somewhat. There are also flashes of To Bring You My Love in acoustic ballads like “No Child of Mine” and “It’s You”, the electric minimalist electronica of Is This Desire in “The Slow Drug”, and some of the vulnerable long songs of tracks like “You Come Through” are echoes of her previous album Stories from the City. With this the album sounds like Harvey coalescing all her previous experiences, and then with the immediacy of the production and length of song writing on Uh Huh Her using them to create a unique sound.
Harvey’s 70’s rock influences still show themselves in Uh Huh Her. There are Janis Joplin like wails on full on rockers like “The Letter”, probably the most overtly sexualised song about letter, the length and harshness of tracks like “Who the Fuck?” seem inspired by Patti Smith and the percussion and guitar licks of one stand out track, “The Pocket Knife”, having a Rolling Stones vibe to them. But the closest similarity to this album is one that came out the year prior: Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief.
Like that album Uh Huh Her is a guitar album with a profound sense of anger and melancholy that permeates nearly every track. And like Hail to the Thief, it probably needed one more tackle at the track listing. There is a song called “The End”; it is not on The End (it doesn’t even have any words to explain that thematically). The album’s actual end is incredibly strong though, with a definite contender for top 10 Harvey songs; the tender epic of “The Darker Days of Me and Him.” (with the inclusion of autoharp showing ho extremely confident Harvey is in experimenting with new sounds). But after the track finished and silence filled the room, I let out an audible “Oh, was that it? Fair enough then”
There is also a track of seagulls for about a minute. I don’t get it.
To say that Uh Huh Her is the first PJ Harvey solo album that didn’t completely stun me is a testament to just how strong the rest of her catalogue is. Because Uh Huh Her is still a really good album, a good 3 ½ stars. It’s just one that needed to set a more solid road to follow.
What do you think though?
[Individual tracks coming soon…]
PJ Harvey Album Rankings
- Is This Desire?
- To Bring You My Love
- Songs From the City, Songs From the Sea
- Rid of Me
- Dry
- 4-Track Demos
- Uh Huh Her
- Dance Hall at Louse Point