Uh Huh Her

1	The Life and Death of Mr Badmouth
2	Shame
3	Who the F*ck?
4	The Pocket Knife
5	The Letter
6	The Slow Drug
7	No Child of Mine
8	Cat on the Wall
9	You Come Through
10	It's You
11	The End
12	The Desperate Kingdom of Love
13	The Darker Days of Me & Him

Barnes & Noble

There's no shortage of tear-spilling singer-songwriters, but when it comes to spilling blood -- her own or that of the people she's moved to write about -- Polly Jean Harvey stands alone. Uh Huh Her, Harvey's first album in four years, finds her in particularly cutting mode, reflected in the stripped-down presentation, which harks back to early albums like Rid of Me and Dry. The disc kicks off in especially ominous tones, thanks to the threatening bass line that introduces "The Life and Death of Mister Badmouth," on which Harvey intones her intention to take the memory of the title character and "wash it out." She's fairly composed on that track, but a couple of songs later, "What the F*ck" finds her absolutely apoplectic, loosing epithets and wordless guttural snarls into a maelstrom of jagged riffs. There's a good bit of sonic chaos in store on this self-produced album -- "Cat on the Wall," with its fuzz guitar and buried vocals, strafes the senses with purposeful difficulty -- but Harvey's an accomplished enough mood creator to convey doom and desolation in her quietest moments. That's the tack taken on the whisper-soft "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" and "The Pocket Knife," a neo-medieval allegory rejecting the strictures of a damaging relationship. Uh Huh Her is draining to experience -- as it must have been to make -- but once experienced, it's sure to linger in the psyche for a good long time. David Sprague

All Music Guide

Even though she's not quite as overt about it as Madonna or David Bowie, PJ Harvey remains one of rock's expert chameleons. Her ever-changing sound keeps her music open to interpretation, and her seventh album, Uh Huh Her, is no different in that it departs from what came before it. Uh Huh Her -- a title that can be pronounced and interpreted as an affirmation, a gasp, a sigh, or a laugh -- is, as Harvey promised, darker and rawer than the manicured Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. That album was a bid for the mainstream that Harvey said she made just to see if she could; this album sounds like she made it because she had to. However, despite the playful tantrum "Who the Fuck?" and the noisy mix of pent-up erotic longing and frustration that is "The Letter," Uh Huh Her isn't the Rid of Me redux that one might envision as a reaction to the previous album's gloss. Instead, Harvey uses some of each of the sounds and ideas that she has explored throughout her career. The gallery of self-portraits, juxtaposed with snippets of Harvey's notebooks, gracing Uh Huh Her's liner notes underscores the feeling of culmination and moving forward. The results aren't exactly predictable, though, and that's part of what makes songs like "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth" interesting. Earlier in Harvey's career, a track like this probably would have exploded in feral fury, but here it simmers with a crawling tension, switching atmospheric keyboards for searing guitars. Indeed, keyboards and odd instrumental flourishes abound on Uh Huh Her, making it the most sonically interesting PJ Harvey album since Is This Desire? Lyrically, heartache, sex, and feminine roles are still Harvey's bread and butter, but she manages to find something new in these themes each time she returns to them. "Pocket Knife" is an especially striking example: a beautifully creepy murder ballad, the song conjures images of hidden feminine power -- a pocketknife concealed by a wedding dress -- as well as lyrics like "I'm not trying to cause a fuss/I just wanna make my own fuck-ups." "You Come Through," meanwhile, is nearly as direct and vulnerable as anything that appeared on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Uh Huh Her isn't perfect; the track listing feels top-loaded, some of the later songs, such as "Cat on the Wall" and "It's You" come close to sounding like generic PJ Harvey (if such a thing is possible), and the minute-long track of crying seagulls is either a distraction or a palate cleanser, depending on your outlook. Still, Uh Huh Her does so many things right, like the gorgeous, Latin-tinged "Shame" and the stripped-down beauty of "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" (one of a handful of short, glimpse-like songs that give the album an organic ebb and flow), that its occasional stumbles are worth overlooking. Perhaps the most nuanced album in PJ Harvey's body of work, Uh Huh Her balances her bold and vulnerable moments, but remains vital. Heather Phares

New York Times

A beautiful, thorny album painted in broad, rough strokes. Kelefa Sanneh

Entertainment Weekly

Uh Huh Her reasserts that Harvey, now the grande dame of [her] genre, remains unrivaled. Rather than be bested by her obsessions and anger, she uses them for fuel. (A) David Browne