PJ Harvey at the Tiny Desk

November 21, 2023 3:32 AM

This is where Harvey lives as a fully realized artist: on her own artistic plane, inviting listeners to take their time to fully join her. Harvey keeps her gestures minimal as she sets her scenes and speaks through them. Matching her voice to those of her trusted collaborators John Parish and James Johnston as they invoke the forest's ghosts — the "chalky children of evermore" — she lets the fecund imagery of her lyrics resonate.
posted by h00py (7 comments total)

I love PJ Harvey more than any other artist. Her most recent album - songs from which are performed here - is a wondrous, mysterious thing, brought alive in live performance (I saw her amazing show in Glasgow a few weeks ago) and in this performance. The songs on the album are partly sung in the archaic dialect of Dorset, so it can be helpful to read the lyrics to make sense of them, presented on her own site with useful glosses of Dorset terms. (The songs played here are "I Inside the Old I Dying," "A Noiseless Noise," "A Child's Question, August," "I Inside the Old Year Dying," and then finally "White Chalk" from the 2007 album of the same name.)
posted by cincinnatus c at 3:51 AM on November 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

She's fantastic. There aren't too many musical artists who have been around as long as she have and who have never (IMHO) put out a bad album. A couple of hers aren't as good as the others, but I wouldn't say any of them are bad.

I've seen her in concert four times...the first time fell victim to a bad venue with worse sound but the other three shows were great, even when she was opening for U2 in a hockey arena, and her 2017 show at Massey Hall was one of the best I've ever seen.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:51 AM on November 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Highly recommend her book-length long poem Orlam
posted by kokaku at 9:28 AM on November 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Polly has all of me all the time, but still I haven't been able to get into her 'wanderer' sets (like White Chalk and the new one). Still, she's fascinating all day every day.
posted by kfholy at 12:13 PM on November 21, 2023

PJ Harvey is what you hope your kid turns out like when they say, "I wanna make art."
posted by From Bklyn at 7:10 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Groovy as always, with some of the folk-prog/electric-eden aspect..
posted by ovvl at 5:43 PM on November 24, 2023

Mod note: [btw, this post was added to the sidebar and the Best Of blog]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:33 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]