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**PJ Harvey - Is This Desire?**
★★★★☆

By 1998, Polly Jean Harvey had already established herself as one of Britain's most fearless musical chameleons, shape-shifting from the primal guitar fury of *Dry* through the baroque experimentalism of *To Bring You My Love*. Yet nothing quite prepared listeners for the stark electronic wasteland of *Is This Desire?*, an album that found Harvey trading her trademark guitar snarl for drum machines, synthesizers, and an atmosphere so claustrophobic it felt like being trapped inside someone else's fever dream.

The seeds for this radical departure were sown during Harvey's collaboration with John Parish on *Dance Hall at Louse Point* the previous year, where she'd begun exploring more textural, atmospheric territory. But where that album retained some connection to her rock roots, *Is This Desire?* represented a complete severance from the past. Working primarily with producer Flood (U2, Nine Inch Nails), Harvey constructed a sonic world that owed more to trip-hop and industrial music than anything resembling traditional rock.

The album opens with "Angelene," a hypnotic meditation on desire and displacement that immediately establishes the record's unsettling mood. Harvey's voice, multi-tracked into an ethereal choir, floats over skeletal drum programming and processed guitars that sound like they're being transmitted from another dimension. It's a bold statement of intent that announces this will be Harvey's most interior, psychologically complex work to date.

The album's masterstroke is "The River," a haunting ballad that showcases Harvey's remarkable ability to find beauty in bleakness. Built around a simple piano motif and adorned with subtle strings, it's simultaneously the album's most accessible track and its most emotionally devastating. Harvey's vocals shift between whispered confessions and soaring proclamations, creating a sense of intimacy that feels almost voyeuristic. The song's exploration of memory, loss, and the persistence of the past marks it as one of Harvey's finest compositions.

"A Perfect Day Elise" serves as the album's closest approximation to a conventional song, driven by a hypnotic drum loop and Harvey's most seductive vocal performance. The track's exploration of obsession and romantic fixation perfectly captures the album's central themes while maintaining enough rhythmic drive to satisfy those craving something approaching danceability. Meanwhile, "The Garden" strips things down to their absolute essence – just Harvey's voice, a drum machine, and layers of atmospheric processing that create an almost liturgical sense of reverence.

The album's experimental nature reaches its zenith on tracks like "Joy" and "The Sky Lit Up," where Harvey pushes her voice through various electronic filters and effects, creating sounds that seem to emerge from the unconscious itself. These aren't always easy listens – Harvey demands patience and attention in ways her earlier work never did – but they reward careful listening with moments of genuine transcendence.

What makes *Is This Desire?* so compelling is how completely Harvey commits to its vision. This isn't an artist dabbling in electronics; it's a complete reimagining of what PJ Harvey could be. The album's themes of desire, displacement, and spiritual yearning are perfectly matched by its stark, minimalist production. Every sound feels deliberate, every silence pregnant with meaning.

Critics initially responded with confusion – this was 1998, after all, when Britpop still ruled and electronic experimentation was largely confined to the margins. Some dismissed it as Harvey's "difficult" album, a pretentious detour from her guitar-based strengths. Time, however, has been kinder to *Is This Desire?*. The album now stands as a crucial bridge between Harvey's early work and her later masterpieces like *Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea* and *Let England Shake*.

More importantly, it established Harvey as an artist unafraid to completely reinvent herself, a quality that would become her defining characteristic. The album's influence can be heard in everyone from Radiohead's electronic experiments to the atmospheric work of artists like FKA twigs and Fever Ray. It proved that rock artists could successfully navigate electronic terrain without sacrificing their essential identity.

*Is This Desire?* remains Harvey's most challenging album, but also perhaps her bravest. It's a work that demands to be experienced as a complete journey rather than a collection of individual songs – a meditation on longing that's as beautiful as it is unsettling.