PJ Harvey
4-Track Demos

THE REVIEW

PJ Harvey is at her best when she's bare. When she shows all her protruding bones, her unconventional ugliness/beauty, her scars, her smell, and her taste. When she is a female in a manner that frightens, enthralls, disgusts.

When, as in this album, there's just her voice and her guitar, and in this case, the overused expression "laying bare one's emotions" has never been so fitting. "4-track demo". It is nothing more than an alternative and infinitely rawer version of "Rid of Me", the album produced by Steve Albini, which suffers from a certain rich and "fake" production that now makes it sound "so 90s". It was Steve Albini himself who encouraged Polly Jean to release the album, enchanted by the raw charm of the 8 tracks.

The album opens with one of the most beautiful and frightening pleas and threats of love that PJ has ever written, "Rid of Me", feel how she scratches her Telecaster deep in your ears, and listen to PJ whisper "Lick my legs I’m on fire" and you'll understand much of what sexual desire is for a woman. Her version of "Legs" (a more than grotesque text) is splendidly over the top, and "Extasy" is magnificent, saturated with desire. Every song becomes more vivid, uncomfortable, and disturbing; compare the previous version and this one of "Rub til It Bleeds": in this, it really hurts to rub. Then, the unreleased tracks are very beautiful, including "Hardly Wait" and "Easy", in which, yes, there is no rhythmic instrument, but damn, this girl knows how to play (and sing). The crooked final blues, "Goodnight", gives chills.

The truth is this record is epochal because in this record there is a real woman, a woman with her desires and cravings, a woman full of irony and intelligence, and perhaps it's the first time she's seen like this, naked and proud, so close to you.

This woman is every woman.