4-Track Demos
| 4-Track Demos | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Demo album by PJ Harvey | ||||
| Released | 19 October 1993 | |||
| Recorded | 1991–1992 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 47:24 | |||
| Label | Island | |||
| Producer | PJ Harvey | |||
| PJ Harvey chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Entertainment Weekly | A |
| NME | (8/10) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Spin | (10/10) |
4-Track Demos is an album of demos by British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. It was released in October 1993 by Island Records. It consists of 8 demos of songs from her previous album, Rid of Me, along with 6 demos of some unreleased tracks which never made it to being recorded with the three-piece PJ Harvey line-up. According to interviews with Harvey, all fourteen of these songs were written and demoed at her home between mid-1991 and autumn 1992. 4-Track Demos was Harvey's first self-produced album, a job she would not take on again until 2004's Uh Huh Her.
Prior to the release of 4-Track Demos, Harvey had a history of releasing early versions of her songs. The demo versions for the songs on her debut Dry were released with the studio album in a limited edition double album format called Dry (Demonstration). She briefly contemplated releasing Rid of Me as a double album, consisting of the studio album on one disc and the demo versions on another. But, considering Rid of Me was to be her major label debut, a double album ended up being a move that neither Harvey nor Island wanted to make.
Harvey explained the reason for releasing this record to Filter magazine in a 2004 interview: "4-Track Demos... was partly encouraged by Steve Albini [producer of Rid of Me]. He loved the demos for that album so much he thought they should be out there and I tended to agree with him. It seemed like showing another side of what I do and introducing new songs that I hadn't recorded on a record. It was a lovely thing to do and it felt like the right time because my three-piece band had fallen apart and I was kind of in limbo before deciding where I was gonna be going again. So, it was just like a small interjection piece of me before I knew where I was going to be next."
As of 2005, 4-Track Demos had sold 119,000 copies in the U.S. The album charted in both the United Kingdom and the United States upon its release, peaking at number 19 on the UK Albums Chart and number 10 on Billboard's Heatseeker Albums chart. Some reviewers preferred this version to Rid of Me, which they contended buried some of her vocal range and sonic experimentations under its noisy, in-your-face dynamics. For a side project, 4-Track Demos received remarkably high praise: Entertainment Weekly called it "a chillingly intimate peek into the fierce musical ethic of an independent and compelling voice",Melody Maker hailed it as "viciously aggressive music with no numbing narcotic qualities", while Rolling Stone said in its four-star review that "its depth, range and conceptual completeness make you wonder why Harvey even bothered with such conventions as a band or a producer in the first place".Robert Christgau, however, still preferred Rid of Me over 4-Track Demos.
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