Stories Of Growing Up

You know you're getting old when you start seeing your favorite rock stars age. And on Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, PJ Harvey shows that while she's still one of music's most exotic femmes, she may finally be fully grown up.

This album is certainly a long way from Harvey's debut, Dry. Her nude photo in the album art crystallized the record's raw, naked sound that put punk fury in a very English and female context. The outrageous, uncompromising Rid of Me followed. After that, though, PJ got more interested in the keyboard and quieter, sultrier textures, letting her whispers frolic unpunctuated by screams. Nineteen ninety-eight's Is This Desire nearly gave Harvey the Madonna treatment, dabbling a bit too heavy in electronica-lite for some people's taste.

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea is both an acknowledgment of maturity and a return to form, offering a more variegated sonic environment where noisier rockers bleed into cloistered city ballads. Synthesizers are back where they belong-in the background-leaving Harvey's voice firmly in front of the mix. It's her most open vocal effort yet, coming across throaty, soaring and evocative. She's always been one of the most exciting female vocalists in rock, and this album gives us our fullest dose of her yet.

Much will be made about the appearance of another of rock's greatest vocalists on this record-Harvey's three mesmerizing duets with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. "The Mess We're In" gives Yorke's angsty claustrophobia a chance to lead over Harvey's pleasurable moan in one of his sexiest tracks ever. It's an unusual thrill to hear the words, "I dream of making love to you now baby," given the Yorke treatment. It's leaps and bounds improved over Harvey's last big duet, the lousy "Broken Homes," that appeared on Tricky's Angels With Dirty Faces.

Lyrically, Harvey still seems rattled all over by sexual tension. She still dabbles in men like a broken veteran, playing loose with sex and guns on "Big Exit" but yielding to her wildest obsessions on "This Is Love." There's nothing quite on par with "Long Snake Moan" going on here, but Harvey has hardly abandoned her estrogen surge. While it can't compare with her slithering, erotic onstage presence, hearing Harvey croon, "When you taste so good / I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering / While my head burns / This is love that I'm feeling," on "This Is Love," is still enough to give you goosebumps.

Ditto for "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," an aggressive ode to life's jagged edges. And while Harvey may have smoothed a few of her own roughest moments, Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea proves that she's still worth our time.