PJ Harvey
To Bring You My Love is awash in references to mothers and children, and the most immediately arresting thing about it is Harvey’s voice. Her tunes will quickly insinuate their way into your memory, her arrangements will soon reveal their ingenuity, and her lyrics will eventually sink their awesome claws into your consciousness. But the thing that will hit you in the face like the wet kiss at the end of a hot fist is the sound of her voice. Or, to be more accurate, the sound of her voices, since there is no single Harvey cantus here. Instead there are a host of different vocal modes, some created through studio techniques–miking, distortion, electronic treatment–and others conjured from someplace between Harvey’s vocal cords and her mouth. And a peculiarly powerful pack of voices has she.
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The cover of To Bring You My Love is a takeoff on symbolist painter John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia”–Harvey is supine, nymphlike, immersed in water up to her ears, eyes closed as if listening. Drowning and bathing, like motherhood, are recurrent images on the record. Metaphors of liquid envelopment are also used by proponents of the theory of prelinguistic mother-child sonic communion, who say sound is a matrix similar to the placental matrix that encases and protects the baby and manifests oneness with its mother.
