PJ Harvey Uh Huh Her [Island] It all comes down to track three, Who the F***?. Is PJ Harvey howling once again at a weak lover, or has she taken the scissors to the neck of a hairdresser after a bad cut and blow? We tender as evidence the lines: 'Who the f*** do you think you are? Get out of my hair ... I'm not like other girls. You can't straighten my curls.' The question begs because Harvey is following her best and most accessible album, 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Part of Uh Huh Her suggests she has stuck with the smoother varnish of Stories, whose success might encourage Harvey to try a treatise on the blinkered hairstyling industry. Pocket Knife is an adult embellishment of The Who's My Generation: 'I feel like I've just been born, even though I'm getting on ... I'm not trying to cause a fuss/ I just want to make my own f***-ups'. But much of the new release suggests a return to the gaunt, bluesy punk that dominated her early work. It's a reward for old fans and a taste of the real thing for the new. Producing and playing every instrument bar percussion, Harvey reinforces the raw girl-vs-world attitude she cultivated in the 1990s. She also returns to references to notable boyfriends. The End is dedicated to filmmaker Vincent Gallo. The Darker Days of Me and Him is the old PJ offering a post-feminist take on John Lennon's Imagine: 'I long for a land where no man was ever known/ With no neurosis and no psychosis, no psychoanalysis and no sadness'.
