313. PJ Harvey, "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea"

 


PJ Harvey, who is such a big deal that she got an MBE for "services to music," has put out nine albums.  Any time an artist puts out nine albums, they're not all going to be gems and, I'm sad to say, this is not one of her gems.  (I already checked and a definite gem is later on the list.)  I guess it's her New York City album.  Everyone's gotta make an album about how much they love New York City, and here you go.  Spoiler: it's not exactly packed with incisive truths about the city that no one's thought of before.

The whores hustle and the hustlers whore 
Too many people out of love 
The whores hustle and the hustlers whore 
This city's ripped right to the core

Tough town, man.  You don't say?  Plus she lets Thom Yorke sing a song and when you're not expecting Thom Yorke and he pops up it's disconcerting.

Of course, this is just my personal thing.  I know a lot of people absolutely adore this album and hey, that's great!  I feel like about half of this project is me acknowledging that maybe some albums just don't work for me, and that's cool.

Pitchfork, which was then a relatively young site, gave this album a 5.5, which is definitely the lowest rating I've seen for any album on the list so far.  (This also means that PJ was a full point lower than Peppa Pig's Peppa's Adventures: The Album.)  If I had a team of research assistants, I'd figure this out definitively, but I don't so I won't.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Nah.

Comments

  1. GGAugust 9, 2021 at 2:38 PM

    16 years later and whenever I see "MBE," I can still only read it as "Multistate Bar Exam"

    ReplyDelete

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