PJ Harvey and the original love country house

When Dorothy is dragged by a tornado and flies home with her until she ends up in the Land of Oz, the world becomes a different place than what she knew in Kansas. A territory far from his farm and full of novelties where witches and fairies exist, jumping dwarves emerge from everywhere, talking to animals, scarecrows and tin men and following yellow tile paths to reach cities with stone names precious. That world, as fantastic as it is unpredictable, is in a place where the timid and fearful Dorothy transforms into another Dorothy.

Transforming is a word that PJ Harvey knows how to conjugate very well. Not so much because he had Dorothy's adventures in his head in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the popular children's book written by Lyman Frank Baum and illustrated by WW Denslow that gave rise to the very famous film directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland, but Because from the first day she decided to become a singer, fascinated by the voice of Elvis Presley, she applied the verb with determination. As a Dorothy ready to reach her Emerald City, she published To Bring You My Love in 1994 , an album with which she offered another profile of herself after two first albums that had left the indie world speechless .

Unlike the protagonist of the children's story, PJ Harvey is not a being of exasperating candor and innocence, but in his music, as in the Oz fable, there is an urgency to cross yellow tile roads, a fast-paced vital pulse by chasing traces of a new path, in order to achieve personal fulfillment. Under the umbrella of the Island label, absolute reference for the best British music, the singer had published in 1992 Dry, one of the most groundbreaking debuts in alternative music, and confirmed her status as an indie heroine a year later with her next album, Rid of Me , produced by Steve Albini, the magician of the abrasive sound so characteristic of the nineties. With that tortured and aggressive rock, Rid of Me placed PJ Harvey as an underground star and punk rage in full control of grunge. However, as driven by an irrepressible desire to achieve new goals, PJ Harvey transformed into another being. As if the great production of The Wizard of Oz went from black and white to technicolor, as if there was a magic trick to show that universe of fantasy and paranoia differently, the singer snapped her fingers and surprised with To Bring You My Love . From that furious black and white on the cover of Rid of Me, with its creator posing with a challenging look, to that colorful To Bring You My Love , with PJ Harvey floating placidly on the water and bathed in a warm light.

If PJ Harvey were like a Dorothy with a damaged look and electric shocks, she turned the story around. Unlike any star of his time and of almost all times, after the overwhelming triumph of Rid of Me , he did not stay in London to co-star with more indie figures . With the money he earned, he bought a house in the country, lost in Yeovil, in the county of Somerset, in the southwest of England, and settled there. He renounced the cultural life of the metropolis to pursue his muses in the forest. The result, as in the story, was that Dorothy was no longer Dorothy herself after undertaking the adventure of music.

As if they were Dorothy's red blades hitting each other to return home, the guitar riff he opens To Bring You My Love with comes from afar, as announcing a magical journey. PJ Harvey doesn't have to say that "you are better at home than anywhere", but that the indie rock adventurer ruminates her own words: "I was born in the desert / I've been for him for years / Jesus, come closer / I think that my time is near / And I have traveled through dry land and floods / Through hells and high waters / To bring you my love ”. The independent music boxer, champion of post feminist manifestos, offers from the first chord a different profile, transforming herself into a more vulnerable and disoriented woman, but absolutely captivating. Absolutely herself.

PJ Harvey mutates his own story as if he were mutating any fable. Locked in that country house, To Bring You My Love was composed as if she were entering a path full of footprints, scratching on closed nights more confessional and piercing letters, discovering in solitary days new spiritual edges of herself. With its sought-after distortion downgrade, the album transits more friendly melodies to previous ones without losing all that sensual venom so characteristic of it. There are fuzz crashes , like dwarves climbing between branches of a mysterious forest, illustrated in compositions like Meet Ze Monsta and Long Snake Moan , but there are also visions of highly hypnotic lofi melodies , like fairies lighting up in the dark, exemplified in songs like Teclo and I Think I'm a Mother . Dwarves, fairies, witches and strange paths mix in a theatrical and dark rock in which the guitars breathe fire so that, just a few seconds later, the song is drowned.

Everything gives off an excessive air. PJ Harvey is never measured by equilibria, but rather by impulses that carry the listener. In this album there is a lot of Tom Waits and Nick Cave -with whom he had a well-known relationship at the time and whose breakup he plans on the album-, guys who would get drunk with the forest dwarves to distort any glimpse of glamor, beings who taught how squeezing John Lee Hooker and Howlin 'Wolf night blues to recreate them in a mask tale, but there's also plenty of Patti Smith, a godmother of despair, the woman who shines in emotional torments and thunderstorms, a witch Nihilist where the predictable, the politically correct, what lives comfortably outside the desert reigns, a place understood here as a metaphor for a journey through Oz.

Oz or that land of discovery. With her deep religious soul, To Bring You My Love closes with Send His Love To Me and The Dancer . The first is a song whose video clip showed PJ Harvey, boots in hand, leaving a lost house in a desert that was also lost. "The lover had to leave me / To cross the desert plain," is sung in the first lines. "Send me your love," says the refrain. At the end of the video, PJ Harvey dances alone. The dance that the album will anticipate The Dancer, final closing of To Bring You My Love. The Dancer is a cry for the love that was and does not arrive, for the love that exists and is not touched with the hands, "for the weeping days and for the weeping nights". PJ Harvey's voice scolds at the end of the song, pleading with the "Lord": "Bring peace to my black and empty heart."

The To Bring You My Love fable is, therefore, a journey back home, back to original love, of all that feeling that is reflected as if in crystal play by the different songs on the album. A love as an end. Only there, where Dorothy bumps her chaps and returns home, PJ Harvey, turned into a more vulnerable being, plays her desperate and addictive rock to show us what it means to be locked in Oz, that land where you discover that the most precious desire always missing.