As if its predecessor Rid Of Me wasn’t raw and uncompromising enough, 4-Track Demos strips those fierce songs back even further, giving its listeners access to Harvey’s rough versions of many of Rid Of Me’s songs. While it ain’t a competition, sometimes it feels like these demos best their studio versions – there’s so little artifice between performance and listener that spooked versions of songs like “Hook” and “Legs” feel like eavesdropping. And while it’s disingenuous always to confer either direct expression and/or a kind of reductive primitivism onto demo recordings, Harvey certainly sounds frank and denuded here. The addition of five new songs shows that during the Rid Of Me era, Harvey was writing so prodigiously, she could leave mini-masterpieces like “Hardly Wait” on the metaphoric cutting room floor.

– Jon Dale