This was posted on another PJ forum recently, and I thought I'd pass it along. It's taken from "The World Is Yours: Some Thoughts on Music in 1998" by Jason Anderson:

TROUBLE AND DESIRE

An album that set my world on fire in 1998 was PJ Harvey's Is This Desire?, but the reception it received was far different than those which greeted her previous albums. Alternative Press put Rid of Me in its Top 10 and Is This Desire? acts very much like its double. Like Rid of Me, it doesn't seem to be dominated by one persona, like the vampy Lotte Lenya in a red dress pictured on the sleeve of and audible in most songs on To Bring You My Love. Is This Desire? rejects overt theatricality just as Rid of Me rejected the singer-songwriter confessionals of the first album, Dry, and both do so in favour of a freeplay of identity. Now, Harvey seems a cipher again, a medium for the emotions and expressions of her characters. And like Rid of Me, Is This Desire? could be seen as having a subsidiary work filled with working, unfinished versions of songs or ideas found in the later work. Shortly after Rid of Me came Four Track Demos, which included alternate versions of Rid of Me songs except without the heavy-metal muscle. (It's possible they were recorded after the versions on the Rid of Me albums, and it's not clear which version is supposed to supersede the other, if at all.) Between To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? came Dance Hall at Louse Point, a collaboration with longtime collaborator John Parish that seems very much like a first draft for Is This Desire?, with some similar characterizations and song structures but little of the careful texturing in the production of the later album. (The songs performed at Dance Hall at Harvey's concert in Toronto in October drew me back to that album, and my impression was that they'd only recently been "finished," although the versions on the 1996 album were more interesting than I remembered.)

This sense that competing versions of the same songs or the same albums may exist further clouds the issue of authorial presence, as does the variety of characters on the latest album (e.g., Angelene, Catherine, Joy, Dawn). On Is This Desire? and Dance Hall, as with Rid of Me and Four Track Demos, there are too many different, competing voices to easily discern where "PJ Harvey" is supposed to be.

In an age in which celebrity's public persona must be as marketable and ready to be sold along with the cultural consumable to which it is attached, it's strange to say that I really have no idea who PJ Harvey is, even though I've followed her career in the '90s fairly closely. Though she did a tiny number of intelligent but not necessarily illuminating interviews at the time of its release, Is This Desire? was not accompanied by a big, well-orchestrated publicity push to completed the package for potential consumers. (This is increasingly necessary for albums that need to open with big numbers-e.g., the media blitzes for Madonna's Ray of Light, Alanis Morissette's Former Supposed Infatuation Junkie and Smashing Pumpkins' Adore, which were identical in intensity in Toronto, lasting as long as four days a piece.) Also, there wasn't a strong, radio-ready first single-"A Perfect Day Elise" works in the context of the album, but was so far from the standard modes for female voices on modern-rock radio that its presence there was fleeting. Unlike other female acts, she did not join the Lilith Fair and capitalize on the modish salability of her gender, though there was a well-received club tour in North America with a band featuring album musicians and collaborators like Parish and Eric Drew Feldman. After nearing a breakthrough with To Bring You My Love, the album's meagre sales in England and North America was undoubtedly a disappointment to her record company Island. (They were rumoured to have rejected Is This Desire? a number of times in hopes of Harvey providing a potential hit single.)

Perhaps as a response to all these conditions and the dimming of her commercial prospects-in fact, her apparent indifference to them- critical reception was relatively cool in many circles. For instance, Spin reviewed it very favourably and kept it in a "recent recommendations" feature for a few months afterward, but did not list it on their year-end Top 20.

Though it feels likely that alt-culture historians will appraise it as a curio or a cryptic and anti-commercial folly, Is This Desire? is PJ Harvey's most sophisticated and affecting album, and her first to provide a coherent sound world. By "coherent sound world," I mean to describe a work that does not rely on a system of direct musical reference or quotation (extreme examples being Oasis and Puff Daddy) to provide context for the listener, but instead has an identifiable palette of tonal colour, rhythm and texture which to refer only to themselves in consistent if mysterious relationships. It is an original arrangement (or rearrangement) of all the tools at a musician's disposal, from production effects to choice of instruments to style of delivery, as well as the relation of song lyrics or mood to musical or production details. As you'd guess, it doesn't happen that often.

As well as a plethora of unfamiliar voices and sounds, the songs on Is This Desire? feature a variety of gestures from seemingly disparate musical genres. The album has the density of much trip-hop or electronica but few moments of beat-friendliness. It is filled with the sort of tragic figures who populate traditional folk ballads but situates them in a decidedly non-naturalistic soundscape. It is specifically concerned with the trials of female characters yet has none of the reassuring pop-feminist arguments or self-empowerment that can be heard in pop by Lilith Fair-friendly artists. (Further confounding the pop-feminist quotient on Is This Desire? is the fact that a large amount of the action takes place at a remove, with Harvey favouring a third-person perspective and neglecting to suggest a particular emotional response by the listener.) It has the intensity of much blues music but none of the primitivist posturing that many purveyors insist on. In an interesting article in The New Yorker article- interesting because the author claimed to have never known a black person who bought an album by Aretha Franklin-Hilton Als cited Harvey and several other white artists (Rickie Lee Jones and Laura Nyro among them) as being more authentic soul and blues artists than Aretha Franklin and Lauryn Hill.

What PJ Harvey does is undersell what she's doing. Considering the increasingly hysterical tone of every aspect of Western culture, that might be the bravest possible decision for an artist of her esteem.