Producer Steve Albini copped a bit of flak from some quarters for his work on PJ Harvey's second album, Rid Of Me (1993). According to some, he didn't "produce" it enough. Harvey disagreed.
The album is one of those rare beasts: a recording of such immediacy that the listener cannot avoid being stung by the barbs that lie coiled within the song's pulsing heart. They spring forth suddenly, whipping and thrashing in an angry dance, and in this mosh-pit of emotion there's no choice but to ride it out and take your punishment.
This loud-quiet-loud sonic template was the signature of bands such as the Pixies and Slint, and Albini's work on the former's Surfer Rosa unquestionably informed Harvey's choices for her eponymously named trio.
But on Rid Of Me the sense of simmering sexual tension and violence is more tangible, the wounds of the protagonist fresher. When the moments of catharsis come, always propelled along by the brutal crack of Robert Ellis' snare, Harvey has you where she needs you, mere inches from the speaker cones and vibrating drumheads of a live three-piece rock band.
The album presents a side of Harvey that hasn't been seen since: the feisty rocker running on punk-fuelled energy.
Perhaps it was a case of getting something out of her system, or a realisation that she could only carry off such a visceral performance once. Either way, Rid Of Me was the album that turned the world on to Harvey as a soul-baring siren, enabling her to stretch a more lithe set of musical muscles on the albums that followed.
Highlights are many but the quintet of tracks that begins with a rollicking take on Dylan's Highway 261 Revisited and ends with the unabashedly frank Dry, taking in first single 50ft Queenie, Yuri-G and Man-Size along the way, is a near perfect slab of no-holds-barred, attitude-packed rock 'n' roll.
