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	PJ HARVEY BOTH SIDES NOW

Anyone who’d heard PJ Harvey’s sixth and latest album, Uh Huh Her (Island), knew it wouldn’t be easy to predict what to expect from her on stage this time around, a dozen years since the diminutive rock diva first hit these shores with a tiny dress, a big blooze-punk guitar, and a stripped-down trio who did little more than that dress to cover her raw emotional outcries. The past 12 years have seen her evolve in challenging and often unexpected ways, first teaming up in 1993 with punk producer Steve Albini for the scabrous yet seductive Rid of Me before dropping her guitar and gussying herself up in a blood-red evening gown to front a larger avant-rock ensemble in the wake of the electro-organic excursions of 1995’s To Bring You My Love (both on Island). Ever since, it seems she’s been on a quest to find a happy (or unhappy, as the case may be) medium between those two sides of her musical personality: the guitar-wielding screamer and the master of mood and texture; the confessional woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the poetic storyteller a step or two removed from the protagonists of 1998’s Is This Desire? (Island). It’s a shame when she doesn’t strap on a guitar; it can also be disappointing when she allows that guitar to get in the way of her subtler side.

Wearing a bright yellow Pop-art dress that featured a silk-screened image of Harvey herself across the front, Polly Jean played to both of her strengths last Friday at Avalon on what appeared to be her birthday. (Her band mates wished her a happy one, and she emerged for the encore in one of those pointy birthday-party hats.) Without a guitar of her own, she tore into "Who the Fuck," the confrontational first track from the new album and a song that hinges on the line "I’m not like other girls." Harvey made the most of a relatively new set-up that featured the three-man backing band of long-time drummer Rob Ellis, guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, and one-time Fall bassist Dingo. Since Klinghoffer was capable of following Ellis beat for beat on a drum kit of his own (as he did on one number), Ellis was free to switch to keyboards. Which meant that no material would be off limits, and indeed, Harvey drew on a wide range of material from her back catalogue.

There were audible cheers from the audience when a roadie arrived with Harvey’s trusty black Telecaster four songs into the set. She strapped it on as Ellis pounded out the beat to "Dress," the track from her debut album that first got her noticed on these shores. Then Ellis and Klinghoffer both hammered away behind her on a deeper cut from that debut CD, "Victory," setting the tone for a set that, for all its diversity, seemed to peak whenever Harvey was at her most raucous and bloozy.