The album also welcomed noted musicians PJ Harvey and Shane MacGowan to try their hand at a Bad Seeds number. White Chalk. PJ Harvey is an iconic alt rock artist. As the wait goes on for album number nine, here’s a look back at her discography to date – ranked in order of greatness…. How possible that actually can be, even when fans are there in person – noses pressed to the glass – trying to drink it all in, is debatable. Though she's … Here's her discography ranked. If Stories… set out to be a straightforward pop album then it’s certainly more labyrinthine and complex than that, but the desired effect to reach beyond the core fanbase was executed so successfully that it must have made her think carefully about what to wish for in future. Drummer Rob Ellis has continued to work with the singer throughout her career, while To Bring You My Love saw the emergence of two figures who’ve loomed large in her story, namely Flood and John Parish (the latter of whom she recording two collaborative albums with; 1996’s Dance Hall at Louse Point and 2009’s A Woman A Man Walked By). Much of this success can be attributed to MTV and the heavy rotational play of ‘Down By The Water’, a song that widely resonated and was a success commercially, despite its rather grisly infanticide subject matter. PJ Harvey Is This Desire? Recorded over a two-year period between Dorset and Los Angeles, the self-produced record is her most DIY, discounting of course 1993’s 4-Track Demos which came out after Rid Of Me. ‘Mansize Sextet’, with its Stravinskian violin strokes and dissonant cellos dragging along the floor, is positively deranged. The tunes! ‘Dress’ became Harvey’s first immediate classic, while ‘Sheela-na-gig’ promotes strong, evocative and often feminist imagery; Sheela-na-gigs are figurative grotesques, mainly found on Romanesque churches oddly enough, that are known for displaying their vulvas. It’s one of those rare records that deserves every accolade it garnered, and they were myriad, not least of all the Mercury Music Prize. This list includes studio albums only, so if you add an album make sure it's a proper studio release. Dry is the debut studio album by the band PJ Harvey, fronted by English singer-songwriter and musician PJ Harvey, released on Too Pure Records on 30 March 1992. Harvey also released 4-Track Demos soon after, which mainly featured these songs and some other unreleased tracks in their embryonic form, and while some have proclaimed them as going deeper than what’s on offer here, one is perhaps better off looking at them as an accompaniment. If crude labelling is your thing, then Is This Desire? It was recorded in Polly’s native Yeovil … Perhaps that’s a result of the cover art, which features a selfy from within a vehicle. Dry (1992) Production wise, Dry does what it says on the tin. Like an aural Picasso’s Guernica, Harvey takes feelings of despair and hopelessness and turns them into something tangible we can all relate to – Let England Shake is good enough to be mentioned in the same breath. Thankfully Too Pure picked it up, as did John Peel, and so too did the Americans, with Rolling Stone naming the then-22-year-old songwriter of the year. ∙ After forming the PJ Harvey trio in 1991, she won immediate acclaim for the lyric intensity and ferocious vocals of her debut LP, Dry, and its first single, “Dress.” ∙ In 1992, she was named Songwriter of Year and Best New Female Singer by Rolling Stone , which later ranked her sophomore LP, Rid Of Me , one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The PJ Harvey discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top PJ Harvey albums can be found at the top of the list. 1995. Interestingly Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released a breakup album in 1987 inspired by Cave’s uncoupling from Harvey; The Boatman’s Call was all about making sense of loss through solitude and introspection, whereas Rid Of Me as breakup album is the other side of the coin, an anguished, tortured, tearing-through-clothes-with-scissors and beating your head against a wall painful. Another heavyweight figure, Thom Yorke, makes an appearance on three tracks, one of which – the gorgeous ‘The Mess We’re In’ – he duets on. To have to rank any of PJ Harvey’s album last on a list is painful, and with White Chalk in particular, it feels like one is doing it a great disservice. Fans flocked from across Europe to see the new album being pieced together last month, after the Dorset-born songwriter announced she’d be flinging open the doors on her creative process this time around by letting fans watch her at work on new songs, in a glass box at London’s Somerset House. 16 Joy Division - Closer. Albums range from To Bring You My Love (1995) to White Chalk (2007). The 20 best albums of 1995 ranked 9. Rid of Me (113 pts) To Bring You My Love (102 pts) Down By the Water (86 pts) Dress (68 pts) The Glorious Land (52 pts) ... listens to one PJ Harvey album. In 2004, her sixth album, Uh Huh Her, was released and became Harvey's highest-charting album in the United States, peaking at number 29 in the Billboard 200. It garnered massive critical acclaim worldwide and became her best-selling album. PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love. Our top ten PJ Harvey songs. Recording In Progress is the logical conclusion to that desire, as she seeks to take away the smoke and mirrors and reveal what’s really going on. Harvey’s rootsy third album tempered the rage of earlier works, however Harvey… PJ Harvey's 50 greatest songs – ranked… Find PJ Harvey discography, albums and singles on AllMusic. OUR SPIRITUALIZED TTT IS UP!!! Harvey pithily borrows the line “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair” from South Pacific to show what she thinks of the idiot accusing her of being an “exhibitionist”. PJ Harvey Albums Ranked. The Californian detail is perhaps the most important; it’s is taught and bruising in some instances and intimate and tender in others, and you can almost always feel the Golden State sunshine bearing down on her face and melting the dashboard as she belts through the desert in a pickup truck. Everything PJ Harvey does is essential, but this one is even more essential than all the others, and you suspect it’ll still sound great in another 100 years. The ambition! Let England Shake. As a result, the album mixes her dark narratives with modern splurges of electro and trip hop and some fairly avant garde instrumentation (take the bass weirdness of ‘Electric Light’), as well as industrial noise (‘Joy) and your more traditional and elegiac songwriting (beautiful opener ‘Angelene’ and the title track). Please join in if you're a fan of Spiritualized. 1 – 25 of 500 ... PJ Harvey - Let England Shake. To Bring You My Love is almost a coming of age album, and bristles with confidence. The slick production! There are personal shots within the sleeve, and inside too are notes to self that include: “Too normal? New York – so synonymous with Smith – features heavily on this record, and on ‘This Is Love’, that other quintessential Manhattan band Blondie can almost be detected reverberating through the floorboards. PJ Harvey. Rid of Me possesses a vital, feral, sexual kind of energy that few albums can even get close to, and it’ll surprise few that much of it was recorded with Steve Albini who always brings a certain je ne sais quoi to proceedings. © 2021 NME is a member of the media division of BandLab Technologies. 2007. A raw and aggressive album, it featured the eponymous trio of Harvey, Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughn just like its 1992 predecessor Dry. PJ Harvey was born Polly Jean Harvey on October 9, 1969 in Bridport, Dorset, and is an English singer, songwriter and musician. PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love. The 1995 album is technically the first solo record, given that Dry and Rid of Me were credited to the PJ Harvey Trio (subsequent pressings are credited just to PJ Harvey). My PJ Harvey Albums List WORST to BEST PJ Harvey has been rocking the Indie scene for almost two decades now. On her second album, the 23-year-old lass from the … The world's defining voice in music and pop culture since 1952. Polly’s back in the studio, working on her follow-up to 2011’s lauded ‘Let England Shake’. Never one to rest on her laurels, Harvey eschewed her guitar to play songs written almost entirely on the piano, a new experience for her; she told The Wire at the time that learning an instrument from scratch “liberates the imagination”, and so it transpired; White Chalk is a white gothic soundscape, gossamery and dreamlike, often beautiful and often strange, it’s almost always piano and rarely if ever forte. Partially because it’s one of the first PJ Harvey songs I ever heard (maybe you did too, it was on Beavis and Butthead), and partially because it’s Polly Jean at her most potent. 2014 saw a whole year of commemorations for the centenary of the First World War, and while many were introduced to the poetry of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon for the first time, back in 2011 PJ Harvey really got under the skin of what war is in the most astonishing artistic statement of her career. Make sure you don't just vote for critically acclaimed albums; if you have a favorite PJ Harvey album, vote it up, even if it's not necessarily the most popular. (1998) The most consistent, beautiful, mysterious and underrated album of her career so far. The opening track of Harvey’s debut album loudly announced the arrival of a singer-songwriter operating in a space entirely her own. The album is ranked number 435 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Patti Smith has undoubtedly been an influence throughout Polly’s career, and on tracks like lead single ‘Good Fortune’ and the excellent opener ‘Big Exit’, that influence is writ largest of all (and on ‘Horses In My Dreams’ where you wonder if she’s talking about the album or the animal). Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2001). PJ Harvey plays her last UK date of the year at London's Royal Albert Hall tonight. To Bring You My Love is considered to be PJ Harvey's breakthrough. The album was ranked number eight on Rolling Stone ' s list of The 50 Essential "Women In Rock" Albums. Listen to Let England Shake now four years on and it will still likely give you goosebumps such is the staggering empathy of this most challenging of undertakings. List RulesThis list includes studio albums only, so if you add an album make sure it's a proper studio release. It was recorded in Polly’s native Yeovil with Rob Ellis on drums and Steve Vaughn on bass, and it has that frenetic energy that only recording novices can truly make. From the very outset, the naked opening strumming of the title track, you get a feeling in your water that Rid of Me is not only going to be fantastic, but that it’s also going to be fantastically raw. If you want to know what is the best PJ Harvey album of all time, this list will answer your question. Just like on White Chalk, Harvey started the process by removing herself from her comfort zone, this time writing much of the material on a chorded zither. To Bring You My Love. Broadly speaking, it’s Harvey’s most earthy record, deeply influenced by the blues of the Deep South, and unsurprisingly it became her first record to crack the Billboard top 40 album charts. Dry is intelligent, intense and very raw indeed; on ‘Oh My Lover’ you can even hear her Westcountry accent breaking through. 2011. In 2002, Q magazine named "Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea" the Greatest Album of All-Time by a Female Artist. In a little over two minutes, she effectively introduces herself with the kind of brashness and hyperbole typically afforde… Polly Jean Harvey, aka PJ Harvey, is the first British singer/songwriter to win the UK's coveted Mercury Prize twice (similar to a Grammy for best album of the year) - first for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), later for Let England Shake (2011). To make voting for your favorite records easier, we haven't included PJ Harvey singles, EPs, or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums. The most challenging singer/songwriter to emerge in the '90s, with brutally honest lyrics that match well to a progression of raw musical styles. Too PJH?”, indicative of Harvey’s ongoing interest in demystifying the process from creation to final output. The 20 best albums of 1995 ranked 9. Harvey’s relationship with the US has always been a symbiotic one where she takes its influences and in turn influences plenty of artists back, and on Is This Desire? Buy Is This Desire? Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. (1998) This will probably be the most controversial ranking on this list. This list of the best PJ Harvey albums includes pictures of the album covers when available. The first track written for the album was the dastardly track ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ which was originally written for Henry’s Dream: “ We couldn’t … Universally and critically adored, PJ Harvey's pristine 2011 effort Let England Shake ranked Aamong the finest albums of the year, but is listed alongside the best of all time. The song found a place on Harvey’s album by the suggestion of her parents. If you think the greatest PJ Harvey album isn't ranked highly enough, then be sure to vote for it so it receives the credit it deserves. Save money when buying the best ever albums! Comments. A list by JIMPY (thagknks for 600) Updated 1y ago. Polly Jean Harvey has never made the same album twice, and neither has she ever made an album as bleak as White Chalk, which finds her trading guitar for piano and haunting her own house. While it might be eighth in this list, make no mistake, White Chalk is a beautiful and arresting listen. Though she's lesser recognized in the US, she's a critical darling among indie rock fans. ‘Dear Darkness’ is spacious and ambient, while the single ‘When Under Ether’ puts the listener in mind of someone coming around from an operation. Rolling Stone also named Harvey 1995's Artist of the Year and Spin ranked the album third in The 90 Greatest Albums of the 1990s, behind Nirvana's Nevermind (1991) and Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet (1990). Her fifth album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, was released in 2000, received the Mercury Music Prize in 2001 and was considered by critics to be her magnum opus. The win made Harvey the first female solo artist to receive the Mercury Prize in the award's history. The album won Harvey her first Mercury Award, which was only tempered by the fact the ceremony took place on September 11th 2001, the achievement somewhat overshadowed by events in her beloved city across the pond. Respect for pursuing the ambition anyway. Polly Jean Harvey, aka PJ Harvey, is the first British singer/songwriter to win the UK's coveted Mercury Prize twice (similar to a Grammy for best album of the year) - first for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), later for Let England Shake (2011). Kurt Cobain was a self-proclaimed fan too, and it’s easy to see why. 1: 1. Joy Division - Closer. One of the greatest singer-songwriters of her era, PJ Harvey exploded onto the scene with multiple classic albums and quality songs from the first note of any given album to the last. The singer said years later that she put everything into her debut as she thought it might be the only chance she’d get to record an album. Harvey re-imagined Dylan’s song and delivered a jaw-dropping punk version of it. The single "Down By the Water" received extensive airplay on radio and on MTV. Happy 25th birthday to Rid of Me, PJ Harvey‘s goth-punk masterpiece, which dropped on May 4th, 1993. PJ Harvey - Ranking Her Albums From Worst To Best 10 studio albums, two John Parish-collaborations, four entries in 1001 Albums to Hear Before You … Again, the two together exhibit the process of creation from bare bones to mixed down product, a fascinating insight into the production of wonderful music. For a long time Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea became PJ Harvey’s calling card, and in many ways it also became a misrepresentation of who she is as an artist such was its success, but then there are worse albatrosses. Since her debut in 1992, PJ Harvey has gained a dedicated fanbase with a steady flow of critical admiration for her virtuosity in instruments, stylish vocals, and heavy Rock sensibilities. She surveys the carnage through the eyes of the aforementioned war poets and the accounts of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war painters Francisco Goya and John Nash, or anyone else really who has experienced bloodshed in the field of human conflict first hand. 12. For variety alone, it deserves praise, and when you add the eclecticism and the great songcraft, you’d have to say this is PJ Harvey’s most forward-thinking album to date. 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