A Woman A Man Walked By
March 26th, 2009 by Andrew“Made of chicken liver parts.”
Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish have been collaborating in the recording studio for the better part 20 years, initially with Harvey adding guitar and vocals to Parish’s band, Automatic Dlamini, in the late eighties, and later with Parish performing on and producing many of Harvey’s solo albums. A Woman A Man Walked By is the second duo album recorded by the pair - the first being 1996’s Dance Hall At Louse Point - in which Harvey writes and sings all of the vocals while Parish writes all of the music.
The album’s opening track and first single, “Black Hearted Love,” gets things started in the best possible way - with a dark celebration of a miscreant eroticism (a familiar lyrical theme for fans of PJ Harvey). Parish’s grungy guitar lines move the song forward, establishing an early sense of anxiety, as Harvey’s delayed vocals come in to add some suspense: I think I saw you in the shadows / I move in closer beneath your windows / who would suspect me of this rapture?. Also, the video, like most PJ Harvey videos, is equally sensual, creepy, and awesome.
A good chunk of the album could be summarized aptly as a series of nightmarish folk tales and soured love songs. ”Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen” is a driving, layered banjo composition with a horrifying narration of a hide-and-go-seek game in the woods gone wrong. ”The Soldier,” in which Harvey’s narrator imagines a dream and seemingly shifts between the nightmare and a desolate reality, is similarly composed on the banjo, and backed by a ringing saloon piano.
“Leaving California” and “The Chair” are a pair of lost-love songs paired together on the front-half of the album, with dissimilar relationships to love and place. In “Leaving California,” the narrator decides once and for all that she’s leaving whoever she followed there, but spends most of her time saying goodbye to the state itself - asking it for some shade, and inquiring “How could I believe that I could live and breath in you?” instead of saying her piece to the person she appears to be leaving behind. In “The Chair” a damaged matron is bereft when her son can’t be found sitting in his favorite chair. The layered vocals build as another saloon-style piano bit drunkenly fuses with the rest of the composition, and the narrator recalls a menacing, dire story of her son “washed away in the water.”
“A Woman A Man Walked By/ The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go” and “Pig Will Not” mix up the album’s predominantly possessed and somber tone with something more vibrantly angry. ”A Woman A Man Walked By” is memorable for Parish’s initial punk-acoustic riff and for Harvey’s playful bitterness and rage, which culminate with her growling “I want your fucking ass,” before the instrumental “The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go” gives Parish a turn to explore similar sentiments. ”Pig Will Not” is essentially the ultimate rejection. Defiant, loud, and straight bumptious, the raucity continues until the yelping and noise is unceremoniously shoved to the rear and the saloon-piano diligently returns, which seems pretty mature.
And with that, “Passionless, Pointless” mourns the night a stubborn argument (developing into some notorious back-turning, wall-facing, and brooding) allows you to see when an intimate relationship is totally fucked, and wonder “how did we ever?” The finale, “Cracks In The Canvas,” is a speak-sing, organ-drone in which the now body-less narrator, perhaps performing the funeral she never got, brusquely tells the big something out there “I’m looking for an answer / need a million of those” and requests “Dear god, you’d better not let me down this time,” before it all ends.








