So neither of these collaboration projects between PJ Harvey and John Parish can be called focused, right? Because throughout this series one thing that strikes me most about Harvey is her commitment to musical ideas and lyrical themes along a single project, so between these two albums and Uh Huh Her the lack of focus always ends up being a slight disappointment.
I mention this negative at the beginning because it’s pretty much my only major complaint with A Woman A Man Walked By. Everything else is an improvement over the pair’s first collaboration, which you would expect given the thirteen year gap between the two projects and the growth from both artists since then. This album, whilst not being a Harvey solo project, makes much sense as a follow-up to the ethereal White Chalk, as from the first – probably most accessible – track “Black Hearted Love”, we see her play with echoes and her highest range as she did on that project. This is also the case on one of the albums standout tracks, “Leaving California,” with the ringing guitars, high piano notes and Harvey’s chilling but beautiful falsettos being close to the kind of sounds Angelo Badelementi would impose on the smoky cabaret rooms of a David Lynch film (this sound also moves into the back half of the next track, “The Chair”).
And like Dance Hall at Louse Point, leaving the song writing duties to John Parish means that Harvey can explores the capabilities and theatricality of her voice, and on here it is the best and most varied it has been since Is This Desire? The aforementioned falsettos and echoes are here, but so are the cracking tones of “April”, the snarls of the intentionally abrasive “Pig Will Not” and the vocals of the (half)title track returns to the bluesy surrealism in which Harvey embraces her Captain Beefheart influences (and if don’t like that, she’ll tell you where to stick it). On occasion her presence and character based of lyrics will save track; the track “The Solider,” particularly at the beginning with its ukulele and singular organ notes, drifts dangerously close to the soundtrack for the third act point in a mumblecore movie where the characters sit in a bathroom and contemplate their quarter-life crisis or something. But the actual subject of dreaming yourself as a solider, and those final cries of “Send me home…” found my jaded self-moved to near tears by the end, particularly as the outro fills out that initial sounds.
Speaking of those sounds, Back in the Dance Hall at Louse Point post I complained that many of the verses in that album got too repetitive. This album certainly doesn’t have that problem, to the point that songs like the (half)title track, “The Chair” and “Passionless, Pointless” have endings that sound almost completely different to how they began. This almost stream-of-consciousness of performance adds to the dreamy, eulogy feel of many of the tracks, and whilst the lack of a straight musical goal throughout the whole album sometimes strikes me as a problem, it also means there is such a variety of sounds, be that the sliding folk blues of “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen”, the floating piano tremolos of “The Chair” and those ceremonial organs (such as in the previous album), in “April” and the final calls of the self-funeral of “Cracks in the Canvas”.
A Woman A Man Walked By is both more musical varied and more accessible than Harvey and Parish’s previous collaboration work (though probably still not something ever destined for large popularity). As a before and after picture Dance Hall and Walked By demonstrates just how far both artists have come in her sounds and artistic outlooks. Still, perhaps Harvey should be spending time thinking less of singular people, and perhaps more about a whole country….
What do you think though?
PJ Harvey Album Rankings
- Is This Desire?
- To Bring You My Love
- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
- White Chalk
- Rid of Me
- Dry
- 4-Track Demos
- A Woman A Man Walked By
- Dance Hall at Louse Point
- Uh Huh Her