After the first few listens to PJ Harvey's "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea", I was totally loving it (my initial reaction to each new PJ Harvey album is to declare that it is her best ever, with the exception of "To Bring You My Love", which took three years for me to fully appreciate. After a few months I always come to my senses and scold myself for ever doubting that "Rid of Me" wasn't her finest recording). My mate Paul, a far bigger fan of Polly Jean Harvey than I am, also thought it was a fine album, but remarked that the final two tracks, sweet ballads they may be, but "a bit too Sarah Mclachlan". And the more I've thought about it, the more I'm convinced that Paul may have summed up the entire album with that comment. One thing which has always separated PJ Harvey from the multitude of female wimp-rockers is the menace that she brings to her records. In the case of "Dry" and "Rid of Me" this needs no explanation, "To Bring You My Love" featured the fierce "Long Snake Moan", and femme fatales a plenty -- "To Bring You My Love" and "The Dancer" in particular. What's more, she dressed like a sexually repressed farmgirl dressing as a tomboy dressing in drag, and if that's not a person that you absolutely do NOT want to be alone with in the back seat of a parked car, then I don't know what is. Anyway, she started dressing normally for "Is This Desire?" which ranged from the near industrial "A Perfect Day Elise" to the plurality of "character" songs with their bleak tales of lonely, abused young women. Lighter on the menace but heavy on the eeriness. Fear abounded. Now comes "Stories" -- where is the fear? The music itself is very radio-friendly. It is far from the desolate electronic-tinged moods of "Is This Desire?". "Big Exit" and "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" turn up the guitars but the Sarah factor looms large over the less aggressive tunes like "One Line" and "A Place Called Home". The menace presumably because this is a "New York album". Many people have written this but not a single person has defined exactly what "New York album" means, as if it were supposed to be obvious. I think it means "Velvet Underground", since they (and subsequent Lou Reed albums) are the finest examples of music about urban decay, drugs, the freaks who inhabit a city's underbelly, and introspection about all of the above. Polly was already an expert at writing about most of these, so I'm not sure how moving to NYC and mentioning Manhattan by name in her lyrics makes her new record so distinctly different from her others. As for the music, it's sounds more "Loaded"-era than EPI-era VU. At that point in the Velvets career, the songs were far less intense and the subject matter greatly toned down. The same could be said for the progression of PJ Harvey's career.

Then again, maybe I'm just a crybaby who's been waiting seven years for Polly to write another "Rub Til It Bleeds".

(That's all I have to say about PJ Harvey, but I would feel remiss if I didn't mention that she gets prettier as she gets older. I don't care how shallow and sexist that sounds.)