Rid of Me: PJ Harvey's Outstanding Breakthrough Album
Written: Nov 04 '05
Product Rating:
Pros: 50ft Queenie, Yuri-G, Man-Size, Rub 'Til It Bleeds, etc...
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: Rid of Me is easily of the the best albums from the 1990s. It's loud, it's wild, and it's weird but it is also creative and beautiful.
One of the most lasting and most successful female alternative rock acts to come out of the 1990s is also one of the least predictable. PJ Harvey wasn’t ever one to make sweet and innocent music. Her sound was much more along the lines of dark and twisted. As if screaming “screw the butterflies and kittens” at the top of her lungs, the British Harvey preferred instead to passionately lament about sex, grief, religion, and jealousy among other topics.
Harvey, born Polly Jean, began as a band rather than a solo act. The acerbic Polly Jean is a multitalented singer-songwriter. She along wither her bassist Steve Vaughn and Robert Ellis on drums shot to underground alt-rock fame following the release of the 1992 debut Dry. The album earned rave reviews and the song Sheela-Na-Gig charted on the Modern Rock Tracks. Despite these early successes, the best was yet to come for Harvey and company. The band made the best decision of their professional career when they hired Steve Albini (The Pixies, Nirvana) as producer for their second album. It was he who helped clarify the band’s sound for a generation.
Rid of Me (1993) would go on to be PJ Harvey’s biggest critical success. In the years since, the band has released four additional albums—all of which have been widely appealing and each selling slightly better than the last. Rid of Me may not have yielded a slew of hits, but it did solidify the fact that this was a trio of talented artists who shouldn’t be ignored. Edgy, hard, strange, and tortured it extreme and difficult sonically but also beautiful and surprisingly delicate.
Wielding an unruly fourteen songs, Rid of Me contains such classics as 50ft Queenie, Man-Size, and the self-titled album opener Rid of Me. These are personal, intimate looks inside Polly Jean’s psyche. It is refreshing and real and even today over a decade later it still resonates. I love the thick, brooding mix—it definitely works well with Harvey’s uncontrollable punk-influenced vocals. The guitars are heavy and full of feedback and the drums are muffled. Each of these elements helps to define the band as something original and creatively relevant.
Rid of Me is on one hand sonically incoherent as it wildly goes from the quirky Man-Size Sextet to the spat 50ft Queenie with a confident grace that is all too rare in rock music—most bands go overboard with the angst and melodrama while PJ Harvey is content to remain brash, sarcastic, and nihilistic. This is a consistently excellent album in which the songs flow nicely together. With that bit of obviousness out of the way, I have to admit that I do play favorites with the tracks.
Legs is an intense and surprisingly delicate song. It combines elements of folk, punk, and rock and roll in a creative and rich way. I love listening to Polly Jean’s evocative voice which is featured in the front of this mix. It’s a slow, enchanting piece of music. The excellence continues through to the next track Rub ‘Til it Bleeds which is even slower and darker than its predecessor. It’s dominated by Vaughn’s bass guitar and Polly Jean’s wild vocal style. There is variety even within the melody of this one song—the fact that the band can do this without coming off as disorganized is impressive. The fact that the end result is so driving is nothing short of amazing.
My interest is peaked again with Man-Size Sextet which, oddly enough, includes Polly Jean on both a violin and cello. It’s easily the strangest offering of the entire album, but presents a different and more dramatic picture of the tenth track Man-Size. The later version is a much simpler and more immediately gratifying track. It uses the usual rock instruments but Polly Jean’s guttural, mysterious vocals help to make it something both unusual and beautiful. If there’s one thing that PJ Harvey proves, it is that rock and roll in the 1990s can be beautiful. Rid of Me is certainly one of the most glorious albums of the decade.
50ft Queenie is a fast, hard song and is also one of the best of this album. I also think that this was the first song I ever heard from PJ Harvey. Maybe that accounts for my affinity, but I can’t help but think that the varied arrangement and cartoonish delivery also have something to do with it. It’s definitely one of the loudest offerings of Rid of Me but I really, really love it. Yuri-G is the final song I can call an album favorite. Polly Jean’s vocals are muffled throughout most of the new wave/garage influenced song. I can’t help but think that the proliferation of The bands who have appeared over the past five years used this song as a primer. Yuri-G is truly outstanding.
PJ Harvey’s audience in the early 1990s definitely was also drawn to other acts like Liz Phair, Throwing Muses, and The Breeders. That said, I don’t think that PJ Harvey is really all that similar to any of them. Probably the closest in nature is Phair, but where Phair never came across as complex, honest, or particularly intelligent PJ Harvey owns each and every one of these attributes. I’m impressed by Rid of Me just as I’ve been impressed by the rest of the band’s releases including the outstanding later song Down By The Water. If you want to sample some of the best rock of the 1990s then Rid of Me is a must-own.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Track Listing:
01. Rid of Me
02. Missed
03. Legs
04. Rub ‘Til It Bleeds
05. Hook
06. Man-Size Sextet
07. Highway 㥅 Revisited
08. 50ft Queenie
09. Yuri-G
10. Man-Size
11. Dry
12. Me-Jane
13. Snake
14. Ecstasy
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