You used to have to work so hard to be a stan: joining fan clubs, tracking down early EPs, downloading suspicious Megaupload links from message-board threads. Rarities were called that for a reason; they weren’t just served to you on a streaming platter. PJ Harvey, who long shied away from compilations and career retrospectives, never made it easy. Some of her best, most bracing material was exiled from her studio albums, but unless you were scouring eBay for the “C’mon Billy” CD single or seeking out the limited-edition Is This Desire? bonus disc, how would you have known?
PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a centralized meeting point for the singer’s many non-album tracks and orphaned gems. Spanning from her early days, fiddling with a 4-track machine that mentor John Parish taught her to use, to her post-’90s reinventions as a pop-rock shapeshifter, antiwar provocateur-slash-autoharp connoisseur, and television composer, this remarkable, 59-song, six-LP compilation doubles as a shadow history of Harvey’s career, charting her metamorphoses through the songs that didn’t make the cut.
It also reveals the one constant—an unswerving intensity that distinguished Harvey from her imitators. On her early, blues-punk demos (there are just five Rid of Me demos here, presumably because the others already appeared on 1993’s 4-Track Demos), that intensity was channeled through Harvey’s voice, a searing, guttural moan of biblical proportions. Hear her weave in and out of falsetto on the wailing chorus of “Dry – Demo” or deadpan the sinister nursery-rhyme coda to “Man-Size – Demo,” and it’s clear that Harvey was a compelling solo artist well before her eponymous trio dissolved in 1993.
To Bring You My Love, Harvey’s extraordinary 1995 commercial breakthrough, was her first proper solo album. On its B-sides, you can hear the singer reveling in her new freedom and pushing to the outer limits of her sound. The hazily menacing “Lying in the Sun” and deeply eerie “Darling Be There” are studies in minimalism, pointing the way to Is This Desire? “Maniac,” meanwhile, plays like a “Down by the Water” understudy: theatrical and violent. Its distorted organ and drum loop represent one of Harvey’s first excursions into sheer groove, while its roaring vocal proves Harvey is the only Gen-X rocker who can yowl come-ons like “I neeeeeed a man/To make me moan/To make me bad” without the faintest wink of irony.
Around 1997, while demoing “My Beautiful Leah,” an exhausted Harvey recoiled in shock at the grotesque darkness of her own writing. She fell into crisis, and considered abandoning music to become a nurse. Instead, after seeking therapy, she completed 1998’s Is This Desire?, her most goth album, a masterpiece of mood if you approach it in the right space. On Desire, Harvey channeled her isolation into noirish trip-hop, ghostly minimalism, and third-person character studies; its paradox has always been that this is Harvey’s most character-driven work, an album populated by lost, broken women with names like Joy, Catherine, or Leah, and yet she has described it as being “about myself.”