4-Track Demos

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Professional reviews
4-Track Demos

Studio album by PJ Harvey
Released	October 19, 1993
Recorded	1991-1992
Genre	Rock
Length	47:24
Label	Island
Producer(s)	PJ Harvey
All Music Guide link Robert Christgau (B+) link
PJ Harvey chronology
Rid of Me (1993)	4-Track Demos (1993)	To Bring You My Love (1995)

4-Track Demos is a 1993 (see 1993 in music) album by British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. 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.

Some PJ Harvey fans actually preferred the clarity of this version to the finished album, which tended to bury 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".

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."