Turn That Noise Down - P J Harvey

So many well-known albums turn 30 this year and Steve Taylor-Bryant and Susan Omand travel back to 1992 to revisit some of the sounds of their youth that made parents shout "Turn that noise down!" This week, Steve looks back at Dry ...

First discovering PJ Harvey feels like a secret I wasn’t supposed to know but found out anyway... that makes no sense does it. It’s incredibly hard to put into words the feeling I got in 1992 when I found a cassette in a friend's house that just had Dry written on the sleeve. Pressing play was like exploring when you were a kid, everything was big and new, exciting and scary. I’d never heard anything like it before, it was raw and emotional. Now, bigger music scholars than me may very well tell me names of acts from yesteryear that sounded like PJ Harvey, or wrote similar lyrical masterpieces but I honestly had never heard a female musician that could bare their soul with such style before that day.

When you read reviews from 1992 about Dry they all try and interpret the songs but none of those reviews say the same as any other. So the real meaning in the lyrics is PJ’s alone to know, but each of us can hear and feel whatever we want and that is some powerful songwriting skill. You can take it as a pseudo religious feminism message, a coming of age tale, or just listen to new song structure and interesting instrumental choices. You can imagine whatever you want and that is the beauty in Dry. It’s timeless because it means whatever you want it to at the time of listening. It’s also criminal that it didn’t sell more and become a worldwide listen. It truly is a masterpiece.



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