Album Review: Mick Harvey - FOUR (Acts Of Love)

Even on his sixth solo record, Mick Harvey works in understatement, maybe still an unconscious reaction to his years as definitive sideman to big personalities, like Nick Cave and PJ Harvey.

FOUR… takes his own music down to that most intimate level – and popular conceit of late – charting the flow and ebb of a single love affair. But from the first suite of five songs Summertime In New York, there's already a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy to the songs – it's a relationship being recalled, maybe even a bit rewritten in memory, rather than of the moment.

At times, it doesn't even need words: Midnight On The Ramparts is the walk home after kissing her on the doorstep, whistling almost tunelessly to yourself, before the thought processes come some way into the stroll. The instrumentation is mostly quiet, the increasingly respected JP Shilo and Rosie Westbrook's upright bass the underpinnings. He does, however, take some songs of others and puts his own spin on them. Van Morrison's The Way Young Lovers Do is quiet, but with some churn underneath maybe suggesting the doubts that remain, while his take on namesake PJ's Glorious comes with echoes of her fierce choppiness in the guitar attack and emotions. 

Then, as so often happens, Wild Hearts Run Out Of Time, as Act 3 rightly puts it. The (kinda) eponymous anthem of it, Roy Orbison's Wild Hearts, cutting back the original's widescreen cri de coeur, to a more personal desolation. FOUR… is just another example of Harvey's careful eye and ear, and a talent that can be confident, self-effacing and honest all at once.