Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
The A.V. Club	(unfavourable)
Entertainment Weekly	A
NME	(8/10)
Pitchfork Media	(6.3/10)
Q Magazine
Robert Christgau
Rolling Stone
Spin	(7/10)

Dance Hall at Louse Point is the debut collaborative studio album by English alternative rock musicians PJ Harvey and John Parish, released on 23 September 1996 on Island Records.

Parish wrote and played the music, while Harvey sang vocals and wrote the lyrics. The pair had been musical collaborators for several years before making this album together – as a teenager growing up in rural England, Harvey contributed saxophone, guitar and backing vocals to Parish’s band Automatic Dlamini before forming her own band in 1991. Parish later served as co-producer, guitarist, percussionist and keyboard player on Harvey’s 1995 album To Bring You My Love, and would also feature heavily on her 1998 album Is This Desire?.

The album was viewed by many PJ Harvey fans as a minor side project – perhaps due to the top billing accorded the more obscure Parish and her own accreditation as Polly Jean Harvey rather than the more widely recognised PJ Harvey name – and consequently it sold more poorly than any of her solo releases, entering the UK charts at #46 and barely denting the U.S. Billboard charts at #178. It yielded only one single, "That Was My Veil", which spent a week at #75 in the UK charts. Harvey later admitted that she left all promotional duties for the record to Parish because she was exhausted following a year of intense promotional activity for her own To Bring You My Love album in 1995. Reportedly, bosses at Harvey’s Island Records label feared the avant-garde venture was "commercial suicide", despite it winning generally positive reviews: Entertainment Weekly opined, "This is 'deep' music in every sense; total immersion is recommended",Musician reckoned "The results are as engaging as they are disturbing....full of strange moves and unusual textures", Logo felt it was "thrillingly sinister", while Q magazine praised its "polecat scat and brooding rural blues", adding that it felt "more a series of themes and word paintings."

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