After countless listens to P.J. Harvey’s latest in preparing my brief review, one of the minor things that struck me is her seemingly throwaway uses of “mouth” in two of the songs: the lovely mouth of Bobby in the title track, and the rotten mouth of the craggy mountains in “On Battleship Hill.” It all reminds me of some conversation or other I had with my friend (and writer) Maria Robinson on how intimate and sexual the image of the mouth is.

Some notes along these lines:

• It is said prostitutes will not kiss their johns.

• Bill Burroughs wrote a lovely routine into Naked Lunch about a talking asshole which would have crying jags because “it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth.”

• Who can forget this sparkling gem of 1970s culture?

I also can’t help but notice that when Ms. Harvey speaks or sings, her mouth has a tendency to sag down towards the lower-right. It could be that a lifetime awareness of such a quirk attunes one to the power of mouth-imagery.