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PJ Harvey, Uh Hu Her

June 22, 2004
Daniel Searle

Past winners of the Mercury Music Prize tend to fall into one of two categories. There are those for whom winning the award is the highlight of their career; a brief parting of the mists of anonymity fleetingly revealing a bashful thank you speech and one relatively successful album. And there are those who contravene the apparent unspoken rule that the Mercury focuses on said lesser-known acts, for whom the award ceremony is just another happy alcohol buffet. PJ Harvey was one such artist who slipped through the ‘already famous’ checks, with her Mercury-winning Stories From The Sea album. If the follow-up carries any proportion of its forefather’s characteristics, then the usually reliable judges would appear to have broken another unspoken rule of the Mercury; that is, not to award the prize to an album which isn’t very good.

The album is consistently lyrically inept – “Badmouth, sadmouth” Polly Jean growls on the opening track, to everyone’s embarrassment – and bears guitar backings which, in presumably intending to sound artfully edgy, replace memorable tunes with music which is, whilst often aggressive, equally often too repetitive to maintain any level of energy, and too unimaginative to be particularly ‘artful’. Tracks come and go and merge into one another, indistinct and generally fairly purposeless. By the latter stages of the album, there appears to be no way in which it can be saved.

Then, from nowhere, Zidane scored twice. In the ensuing melee, this reviewer drank an amount of Lamvino hitherto scientifically regarded as lethal, and left the Discman containing Uh Hu Her in a field near Heslington Road. From that point, the album picked up considerably.

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