PJ Harvey – Uh Huh Her
Released in 2004, on Island Records
The first review in my blog starts very promising… I mean, I have a cool cover art (a bit further), and the record label is mentioned too. Professional, isn’t it? Promise you, the review itself won’t be as professional, as the header… I’m 100% sure I’ll get caught by the flow – you’ll see why.
My situation with this record is quite unusual, because I bought it without listening to any PJ Harvey ever. Okkkay, I admit, the only reason I bought it was her co-operation with Mark Lanegan (two songs on the amazing Bubblegum) and various appareances on Desert Sessions vol 9-10. So she can be considered the part of the QOTSA family. But still, buying an album by an artist I haven’t even heard… it never happened to me before.
I saw it in a shop, 10% off or something like that, bought it. It was a sudden decision. BANG!!, or more of a clink!! (sound of money), and I was the owner of Uh Huh Her.
Totally worth it.
14 songs (okay, the 13th being an utterly unneeded one-minute passage of seagulls). I wasn’t instantly hooked on it. I liked it, yeah, listened to it a few times. Then, another BANG!! came (and it really was a BANG!! this time), sometime around the end of October. I started listening to it, I discovered amazing songs such as The Letter (blues-esque wonder) or Shame (acoustic ballad about love).
Her voice is… I don’t know… it’s brilliant. Many different tones and shades, sometimes raw, sometimes sweet and mellow. The same goes for the music too. The fuzzy Who the Fuck? tends to be punkish in attitude, as does Cat on the Wall, while the marimba-driven (at least I guess it is a marimba…) You Come Through demonstrates a certain laid back feeling.
And now, having listened to almost all earlier works of PJ Harvey I can tell that even this album (the 8th in the row) is still very diverse, unique an… PJ Harvey. That sounds a bit contraversial. She has a very defined sound, so you can always tell whether a song is PJ or not, but almost each song is different.
~ Final score: 9/10
Yes, very high score. It represents the fact that I’ve been listening to a great amount of PJ Harvey (not just Uh Huh Her, but mostly) and I’m hooked on it. And it’s almost perfect.
