<pre>Artist.......: PJ Harvey
Album........: En Concert α l'Olympia Bruno Coquatrix
Label........: Universal
Genre........: Rock
Catnr........: n/a
Source.......: DVBS
Rip.date.....: 2011-09-24
Str.date.....: 2011-00-00
Quality......: 233kbps/48.0kHz/Joint Stereo
Url..........: http://www.pjharvey.net/
track title time
1. Let England Shake 4:23
2. The words that maketh murder 4:03
3. All & Everyone 6:57
4. The guns called me... 3:05
5. Written on the forehead 3:54
6. In the dark places 3:28
7. River 4:50
8. Sky lit up 2:32
9. The glorious land 3:53
10. The last living rose 2:36
11. England 3:09
12. Bitter branches 2:40
13. Down by the water 3:00
14. C'mon Billy 2:52
15. Hanging in the wire 2:58
16. On battleship hill 4:21
17. Speech 5:50
18. Big exit 3:34
19. The colour of the earth 4:27
Runtime 72:32
Size 121.18
Release Notes:
During the early-'90s alternative rock explosion, several female
singer/songwriters rose to prominence, but few were as distinctive or as widely
praised as Polly Jean Harvey. Over the course of three albums, Harvey
established herself as one of the most individual and influential songwriters of
the '90s, exploring themes of sex, love, and religion with unnerving honesty,
dark humor, and a twisted theatricality. At the outset of her career, she led
the trio PJ Harvey, which delivered her stark songs with bruisingly powerful,
punkish abandon, as typified by the 1992 debut effort Dry. Following the noisy,
uncompromising follow-up, Rid of Me, the trio fell apart, and PJ Harvey became
the sole property of Polly Harvey. Her next record, 1995's To Bring You My Love,
became her mainstream critical breakthrough, confirming her status as one of the
cornerstone figures of '90s alternative rock.
Harvey grew up on a sheep farm in Yeovil, England, where she was raised by her
quarryman father and her artist mother. As a child, she learned how to play
guitar and saxophone, and when she was a teenager, she played in a variety of
bands as a sideman. She formed PJ Harvey in 1991 with bassist Steve Vaughan and
drummer Robert Ellis, and the trio recorded its debut record for under $5,000.
The band signed with the British indie label Too Pure and released "Dress" that
fall. "Dress" became a indie rock sensation, as did its follow-up,
"Sheela-Na-Gig," with both singles receiving lavish praise in the U.K. music
press. Although Harvey was a reluctant interviewee, she cannily used the press
to her advantage, whether it was through her candid interviews or startling,
occasionally disturbingly sexy photo sessions, which subverted traditional
concepts of female sexuality.
PJ Harvey's debut, Dry, was released in spring 1992 to considerable praise; it
was distributed in America by Island Records. The trio followed it with an
extensive tour, culminating with an appearance at that summer's Reading
Festival. Shortly after the tour, Harvey moved to London, where she nearly
suffered a nervous breakdown due to the extraordinary pressure and expectation
surrounding her second album. The group hired former Big Black frontman Steve
Albini (Pixies, Breeders) as the producer of their second album, Rid of Me.
Albini imposed his trademark noisy, guitar-heavy sound on the record, which
mirrored its harder-edged themes. Rid of Me was a major critical success and
expanded Harvey's cult greatly. She supported the album with a tour featuring
herself in a fake leopard-skin coat and a feather boa, signaling her developing
interest in theatricality. At the end of the year, Harvey released 4-Track
Demos, a collection of her original versions of the songs on Rid of Me.
Following the Rid of Me tour, Ellis and Vaughan parted ways with Harvey, and she
recorded her third album as a solo artist, augmented by producer Flood, bassist
Mick Harvey, and guitarists John Parish and Joe Gore. Harvey developed a richer,
bluesier sound with the expanded band, and the resulting record, To Bring You My
Love, was hailed as a masterpiece by many critics upon its February 1995
release. Thanks to considerable press attention, as well as strong support from
MTV and modern rock radio for the single "Down by the Water," To Bring You My
Love became a moderate hit, entering the U.S. charts at number 40. Harvey spent
all of 1995 touring the album, and spent the following year in relative
seclusion. During 1996 she was relatively quiet, only appearing twice on record:
once in a duet with Nick Cave on his Murder Ballads album -- the pair were
reportedly romantically involved -- and later on Dance Hall at Louse Point, a
collaborative album that found her teaming up with John Parish. Is This Desire?
followed in 1998. Two years later, Harvey reunited with Ellis and Mick Harvey
for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which returned to her earlier,
more aggressive style and was inspired by her six-month stay in New York City in
1999.
The album won the 2001 Mercury Prize, making Harvey the first female winner of
that award. After extensive touring in support of the album, Harvey split her
time over the next two years working on new material and collaborating with
likeminded friends and contemporaries. She appeared on Gordon Gano's Hitting the
Ground, Giant Sand's Cover Magazine, and John Parish's How Animals Move, but
Harvey's most prominent collaboration was with the Queens of the Stone Age side
project the Desert Sessions. She performed on more than half of 2003's Desert
Sessions, Vols. 9-10, including the single Crawl Home. That summer, she also
performed at the V Festival, previewing tracks from her new album, which she
claimed was close to being finished. The album, Uh Huh Her, appeared in summer
2004, coinciding with another string of tour dates, including British and
European festival appearances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, the Montreux Jazz
Festival, and Spain's La Primavera festival. Stateside, Harvey was scheduled to
join the revived Lollapalooza festival for select dates, joining Morrissey and
Sonic Youth on the main stage. Upon the cancellation of that festival, however,
she mounted a solo tour of the States with select opening acts. Three years
later the ever-evolving musician released White Chalk, her first piano-based
album. She then resumed her partnership with John Parish for another
collaborative project, A Woman a Man Walked By, which arrived in 2009. For
2011's Let England Shake, Harvey took a more political and less personal
approach to her songwriting, drawing on current events to add a fresh approach
to her work with Parish and Mick Harvey.
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