Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

Polly Harvey in a mellow mood? Actually, sort of. While her trademark feminist angst is still largely in place here, by and large the music is less confrontational than in days of yore. Several of the tracks--"Good Fortune," "A Place Called Home," "One Line"--verge on pop; in fact, they could pass for slightly more abstract Pretenders songs ("You Said Something" really does sound like Chrissie Hynde singing a mutant country tune). Given its title, it's not much of a surprise that "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," manages to work up a convincingly atonal guitar racket, but otherwise the only song that really captures Harvey's trademark Captain Beefheart-like fury is (again, unsurprisingly, given its title) "Kamikaze." Other highlights include "Big Evil," which centers around a biting neo-psychedelic riff (sort of "Paperback Writer" gone dissonant), the hypnotically pretty "This Mess We're In," a sort of early Cure pastiche done as a duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke, and the concluding "We Float," a piano-driven ode to making peace with your failures that Harvey sings with a sweetness that's almost inspirational.