Track Listing

1. Big exit
2. Good fortune
3. Place called home
4. One line
5. Beautiful feeling
6. Whores hustle and the hustlers whore
7. This mess we're in
8. You said something
9. Kamikaze
10. This is love
11. Horses in my dreams
12. We float
13. This wicked tongue

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1208 in Music
• Released on: 2003-08-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Explicit Lyrics
• Dimensions: .23 pounds
• Running time: 51 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The most incendiary female British performer to emerge in the 1990s, Polly Jean Harvey has fought against stereotyping every step of her career. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea--her sixth album--is as powerful a record as any she's made. It strikes a masterful balance between her blues/folk roots, avant-garde leanings and soaring pop sensibility. The abrasive and jagged guitars hark back to her fiery 1992 debut album Dry on the ballistic yet anthemic opener "Big Exit" while the dreamy and opulent closer "We Float" demonstrates how her song writing has matured. Elsewhere the clamour and emotional rush of a heady relationship--particularly on the Thom Yorke duet "The Mess We're In"--gives the album a ferocious clarity. The production skills of Mick Harvey (of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds) lends depth and assurance, but though PJ quotes from many influences--The Who, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, even West Side Story--her own indomitable presence shines throughout. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea showcases a singular talent at the peak of her powers. --Gavin Martin

CD Description
Sixth album for feminist rock act lead by Polly Jean Harvey. This release is the follow up to 1998's 'Is This Desire', and was recorded at the Great Linford Manor. Harvey is joined on 'Stories...' by Mick Harvey from Nick Cave's Bad Seeds,and long time drummer Rob Ellis.

Customer Reviews

Pure Genius
First of all, the New York influence and Patti Smith comparison has been much overstated by now; PJ Harvey has repeatedly said that Smith has never musically inspired her and that the vocal likeness is coincidental. That out of the way, I must now heartily endorse Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea – a truly great rock album and one of my personal favourites of all time.

This LP marks a major musical progression for Ms. Harvey. Like her early albums, these songs are built around the three-piece band dynamic of guitar, drums and bass; but this time around she adds lush layers of melody and reverb by bringing subtle shades of keyboard, E-Bow, accordion and harpsichord into the mix. The resulting sound is rich, graceful, tuneful and quite unlike anything she’s done before.

Big Exit kicks off the album in glorious, psychedelic, hard-rocking style. It opens with a wall of bellowing loudspeaker vocals, clattering Led Zeppelin drums and staccato electric guitars before melting into a swooning chorus of “Baby baby ain’t it true/I’m immortal when I’m with you”. The second song Good Fortune is a joyous, romantic, violent Bonnie and Clyde fantasy in which she dreams of going on the run and living a dangerous gypsy existence with her lover. It soon becomes clear that she is celebrating a new type of romantic love and positive energy on this record. Having covered darker territory throughout her career, she enjoys playing with Beatlesque guitar pop and delicate orchestration on songs like A Place Called Home, One Line, This Mess We’re In and the ethereal closer We Float. These are soaring, poignant songs of hurt and hope. Beautiful Feeling and Horses in My Dreams are unplugged ballads of raw, stark beauty. In contrast, at least five songs (Big Exit, The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore, Kamikaze, This Is Love and bonus track This Wicked Tongue) are as tough, fierce and hard-rocking as anything off Dry or Rid of Me.

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea won the Mercury Music Prize, two Grammy nominations, two BRIT nominations, appeared on numerous album-of-the-year polls and prompted Q magazine to vote PJ Harvey the greatest female rock star of all time. For all the critical praise, it met an unusual reaction from some longtime fans. Grumpy doom-and-gloom miserabilists who favoured her darker early work seemed to cynically begrudge Harvey her new-found happiness on this record, and indie snobs felt put out that their “dirty little secret” was now being enjoyed by a wider audience. This has happened to every great rock act who has dared to edge from underground cult worship to mainstream success, from Pixies and Sonic Youth to White Stripes or Queens of the Stone Age. She certainly hasn’t gone soft by any means. The fiery spirit, emotional intensity and musical passion are all still there; the heart beats stronger than ever before.

This magnificent album demands to be heard by as many people as possible.

A modern rock masterpiece
I'm too lazy to bother reviewing many albums here but I had to make an exception for this one. Why? Because it's one of the greatest rock albums I've ever heard and I want new people to know just how good PJ Harvey really is.

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea is a masterpiece from start to finish. PJ outdoes herself on raw, fiery, hard-rocking guitar cuts like Big Exit, This Is Love, Kamikaze, The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore and the brilliant bonus track This Wicked Tongue. The spectacular opening song Big Exit speeds past on blazing, careening power chords and powerhouse drumming courtesy of master percussionist Rob Ellis. Good Fortune and One Line both have a dizzying romanticism and surging energy that make them similarly irresistible. And listen out for the quaking monster riff that opens This Is Love as PJ lustily declares, "I can't believe life's so complex when I just wanna sit here and watch you undress" - it manages to be an electrifying, deliciously sexy hard-rock song and witty, tongue-in-cheek fun at the same time. These songs see PJ Harvey revisiting the punky, bluesy power-trio days of her early albums Dry and Rid of Me, and they reveal her oft-cited influence of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and other classic 70s rock. It's not all bluster and noise though. Gorgeous songs like A Place Called Home, You Said Something, We Float and the heartbreaking Thom Yorke duet This Mess We're In will surprise you with their sparkling melodies and a cleaner production than previous PJ Harvey records. There are also two minimalist, stripped-down acoustic numbers - Beautiful Feeling and Horses in My Dreams - that bring a nicely eerie atmospheric touch to proceedings, nestled in amongst the louder tracks.

The whole album is brilliantly sequenced so that it feels like a loosely conceptual song cycle about a person arriving in a big scary city (Big Exit), finding an exciting but dangerous love (the Bonnie and Clyde references of Good Fortune), then enduring romantic heartache (This Mess We're In) and angry turmoil (Kamikaze) before fading out on a promise to "Take life as it comes" (in We Float). But a few minutes after We Float has reached its dreamy, hopeful end, the head-banging bonus track This Wicked Tongue unexpectedly charges in to bring the record to its bitter, explosive, hardcore finish.

PJ Harvey is a unique, genius-level talent and Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea shows her off at her peak: her voice is brilliantly expressive, her lyrics are unusually poetic, and her guitar playing has a ringing dynamic clarity. She simply has a rare brand of emotional intensity and pure passion that cannot be faked.

I strongly urge all you readers to buy this album now - you will NOT be disappointed!

More Hustle than Whore
Following an unfortunate incident when an idiot ran me off the road a month or so back, the trusty Micra had to go into the garage and, consequently, I had to remove the hundred or so CDs which had accumulated there (this was less because I feared that sticky fingered mechanics would be unable to resist the temptation to pinch a pile of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan cds and more in case they stood on the cases scattered in the passenger side foot well).

The result of this is that now I have my car back the only CDs as yet available are those in the little rack thing hooked round the driver's sun visor, which I had forgotten all about. And the only thing worth listening to in there (even though I put every CD there at some point) is PJ Harvey's album 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea', which I had always dismissed as being a bit too straight up and down rocky to be a good PJH LP.

However, given the choice of listening to 'not at her best' PJ Harvey or, to take a random example of the other CDs available, a Graham Nash live bootleg from 1993, well I've had PJH on the car CD player pretty much constantly for the past week or so.

And it's a truly great album - possibly her very best which really is saying something. From the exultant semi-shout "I'm immortal when I'm with you" in album opener 'Big Exit' to the haunting refrain on the second from last track, 'We Float' ("We float/Take life as it comes"), this is a confident album from an artist at the top of her game.

Where once she asked 'Is this Desire?', now she states 'This is Love'. Which is a pointer to the fact that this is a much happier album than we're used to from Polly Jean. Not that it's exactly the Crazy Frog tune or anything, but it's a long way from 'Plants and Rags' on her first album ("Plants and rags/Ease myself into a bodybag") to this album's 'Beautiful Feeling' ("A smile from San Diego/He's still a boy/Two ends to every rainbow/And a train from Mexico"). 'Good Fortune' continues the positive vibe and even the Thom Yorke duet, 'This Mess we're In", manages to be less than morose (although not a patch on Yorke's earlier duets with Drugstore or Bjork).

For old time fans, the spiky guitar and the confrontation is still there, though - any album with a track called 'The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore' isn't likely to crack the core pre-teen market - but there's a happiness behind it which too often seemed missing in her earlier work. Even the tracks which ostensibly sound like they could be expected to be on the negative or sleazy side often turn out to carry you along on an upbeat guitar line or an unexpected Polly Jean wail (see especially the ending of 'the Whores Hustle' for a wonderful example of Ms Harvey's Yma Sumac-like vocals).

And then, just when you think that the old evil Polly is gone, along comes 'This Wicked Tongue Says', a barely produced burst of pure invective, as Polly curses everyone over almost, but not quite, out of control guitar. This is a track that could fit onto 'Dry' without a problem.

Stand out track for me in an album full of potentials, though, is 'Kamikaze', which is so good that I'm banned from playing it in the car when there's anyone else present, lest I take my hands off the wheel to play the drum rolls on the steering wheel and end up involved in a road traffic incident.

Which is where we came in...