#405: PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me

Rid Of Me can be a somewhat harsh record. In part an effort to strip down her sound after exploring more complex guitar arrangements and acoustic elements on her previous two records, and doubtless a response to the Seattle-dominated American sound of the day, Harvey teamed with producer Steve Albini. The two of them came up with a record as man-sized as anything coming out of the Pacific Northwest, her answer to Kurt Cobain's "Rape Me" (also produced by Albini) being "Lick my legs, I'm on fire." From there, Harvey goes on to show the boys how it's done: "Rub 'Till It Bleeds" serves up a take on the Pixies' quiet-loud formula (which itself bore the stamp of, you guessed it... Steve Albini) that stands well apart from Nirvana's, while Harvey's cover of "Highway 61 Revisited" serves as a refreshingly contemporary and clamorous treatment of the Bobby Zimm classic. "You bend over, Casanova" she howls on "50 ft Queenie" as her size increases, impressively, from ten to fifty inches, while on "Man-Size," Harvey measures time and height as she puts her leather boots on... Musically, the record forges ahead in a compellingly minimalist fashion, with distorted guitars and vocals, noisy drums and little else apart from bass (a string sextet version of "Man-Size" serving as a notable exception). Lyrically, Harvey conjures up an awful lot of feminist discontent. Of course, she swears up and down that the record isn't to be taken as autobiographical, although one can't help but get the sense that she's licking some fairly recent wounds as she breaks into the occasional unhinged falsetto howl... To whatever degree the album is driven by catharsis, all of the elements dovetail into an effective, if unsettling, whole.

Some other thoughts:

# 406, Sinead O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got: O'Connor's follow up to debut The Lion and the Cobra sold 7 million copies, was nominated for four Grammys, and won Best Alternative Performance. Ever the sore winner, O'Connor refused to accept either the nominations or the award (I wonder if she also refused to accept royalties for those seven million records). She then went on to rip up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live the next year, which I have to say, was pretty ballsy, if completely insane.

# 404, The Clash's Sandinista!: The Clash put their punk roots largely to bed with this heavily Jamaican influenced three disc (on vinyl; two on CD) set. Sandinista!, which was -quite literally- all over the map, served as the band's exploration of the emerging world music trend, and was lauded at the time by critics as their masterpiece (Robert Christgau proclaimed it their worst album, then gave it a rare A-). To my ears, the record at times suffers from its own ambition. It was a good idea which I think might've worked better as a trilogy of concept albums, but hey, Bob's yer uncle...