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By: Dennis Cook
This one's a bit of foreign art cinema – touted all to high heaven but the actual experience of it is like the slow drag of minutes one often encounters with Oscar winners from Russia or France, acutely aware what you're consuming is ART, serious business and you're a scallywag to even suggest said stuff might be pleasurable as well as castor-oil-good-for-you. Brass tacks is I loves me some PJ Harvey and quite dug 1996's Dance Hall at Louse Point, her earlier collaboration with John Parish. 13 years on, A Woman A Man Walked By (released March 31 on Island Records) lacks the depth, menace and bedraggled blues character of Louse Point. Oh, there's a few killers here (the scorned but upright bark of the title cut and the minimalist Patti Smith homage "Pig Will Not," for example), but each track is its own thing, and while they equate themselves well enough in noisescapes, quasi-world music, crunchy rock and nitrous cabaret, this doesn't really feel like an album. There's no real through line other than the two personalities behind it, who are apparently far more schizophrenic than one realized.
Outside of some snake charmer electric guitar and an especially purr-y PJ, opener "Black Hearted Love" is generic indie rock swinging a Jesus and Mary Chain and smoking a clove. Fine, they don't all have to be major works, but soon after Harvey begins singing way outside her comfort range, and while experimentation as a general rule is to be commended there is the continual sense on A Woman A Man Walked By that they are having more fun than we are. While not one to suggest artists should pander, listeners must make choices about what to do with their time and it's hard to imagine reaching for this when there's so much by the 50 ft. Queenie that's just plain more enjoyable, engaging, etc. This isn't a bad album, admirable in its way, but also willfully eclectic, sporadically grating and not a small amount of work to penetrate. And there lies the potential rub with this woman and man – time may allow the full digestion of this jagged nutrition. It might actually be brilliant but I'm not sure one should have to work this hard to argue the virtues of a project, which given its participants should really sell itself.
JamBase | Cracked
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