PJ Harvey's latest album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (out Oct. 31) may well be about her search for the soul of New York, bound in tales of a love affair that forms and unravels by Gotham's wayside, but she made no allusion to her songs' source when she played a surprise show at the Bowery Ballroom Thursday, kicking off the city's twentieth annual College Music Journal (CMJ) festival.

Harvey could have played up mentions of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Little Italy and Chinatown, of rooftops, bridges and tall buildings in songs like "You Said Something" and "Good Fortune," but it was as if the references were arbitrary, just something to place the songs' "city" in a real context, never mind which one. What was important, it seemed from Harvey's delivery, was that there remained a clear separation between metropolitan and rural, as if the concrete of one was not only literal but metaphorical (concrete = reality), with the sands of the "sea" being flimsy in more ways than one.

Trying to find a place between the two, some safe meeting ground between the conscious and unconscious, drove the abbreviated nine-song set, which would have been longer, Harvey said, if it weren't for the tight time frame of CMJ showcases. "We would play more if we could," she said before launching into the encore, "but other bands are after us, so we have to get off." Other than modest thank yous, these were the only words she spoke. Instead, she let the fierce lyrics of her new material speak for her.

Gone was Harvey's in-your-face sexuality, replaced with a more mature and complex notion of passion, which infused her vocals in opener "Big Exit" (where pistols overtake peace) and "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" (where disease and drugs undermine hope). Passion and love, as she sang of it in "Big Exit," can be so all-powerful as to make you feel immortal, but at the same time is so precious it's always fraught with danger. Love's force and fragility, then, were the dominating themes of the songs chosen, the more rollicking numbers from Stories that allowed her and her like-named band (now featuring Laika's Margaret Fielder on guitar and cello) to get lost in the seductive beats and insistent guitars.

As the band thrummed through "Good Fortune," Harvey's vocals took on Patti Smith-esque flairs as she appeared to start coming out of her shell, looking and sounding more cheerful than most of the material allowed. And she seemed to delight in the purposefully vague "You Said Something," which alludes to a meaningful conversation between lovers that's never explicated, as if even though she might sing of it, the memory remains hers alone, a satisfactory solution to her desire to both share and protect. Combined with the more expansive arrangement of encore "A Place Called Home," her phrasing in these songs revealed a profound emotional intelligence, where the brooding yet hopeful nature of the songs reconciled themselves in her nuanced delivery. Harvey seemed most warm even when she was at her most intense, as if one couldn't exist without the other -- no crazy drama without peaceful tranquility, no city without the sea.

JENNIFER VINEYARD
(October 21, 2000)