Mean and lean Polly Jean - P. J. Harvey entrances Philly audience with her style and sound

Even the most jaded concert-goers couldn't help but squirm with excitement when Polly Jean Harvey appeared from the recesses of an airy stage in downtown Philadelphia's Electric Ballroom Factory this past Saturday night.

It was hard to believe that a person who could elicit such a passionate stage presence could do it with a casual entrance. Casual, at least, in everything but attire. Decked out in huge, high-heeled black boots, a short, shiny black skirt and a scant glam/goth silvery shirt, and accessorized by a faux upper-arm shackle for the metaphor-hunters, P.J. Harvey and her band charged straight into "Big Exit" from her latest album, Stories from the City, Story from the Sea..

"I walk on concrete," she sang, a melodic shout. "I walk on sand/But I can't find/A safe place to stand/I'm scared baby/I wanna run/This world's crazy/Gimme the gun." Part of her New York City-influenced album from last year, it's an impressionistic take on violence and the city. With the horror of this week, I can't help now but find it chilling.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Hilton Als described Harvey as a Vamp (his capitalization). If the comparison, derived from the singer's own discourse on the subject, was not wrong, then neither was it particularly apt. Harvey, who once covered Kurt Weill's creepy but gorgeous anti-Nazi dirge, "Ballad of a Soldier's Wife," has always been conscious of the artistic and sexual power of the Weimar era's literate vampishness.

Singer Shirley Manson, echoing a similar line from a Ute Lemper retro-cheezy diva song, once called Harvey "part man, part woman, part angel, part cunt." And sure, in concert, Harvey packages both Marlene Dietrich's sexual teasing and the adrenaline rush of an Iggy Pop dance. However, to place her so heavily in the same hip cult of the vamp that spawned Lemper's show tunes or the high camp of Madonna's Metropolis-inspired "Express Yourself" video just seems undue and misleading. Harvey may borrow something of the vamp persona in her live performance, but it runs closer to high art than it does to high camp.

Above all, Harvey is a phenomenal rocker. Moving from guitar to microphone to skull maracas, she looked like a star and acted like one, but never as if the posturing glazed over the music. Often - maybe too often - described as a "demure" girl shedding her skin for the rock stage presence, she offered up many a pleasant "thank you" between songs.

This concert was one of the last in a full year of touring, and much of her set came from Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. She also culled many great songs from her decade-long body of musical work. Fans can argue about the merits of the various chapters of her career, or the impact her "music going happy" makes, but Harvey hardly ever writes a dull song. When songs seem mediocre, especially some of the trip-hop/techno attempts from the middle-era, such as "To Bring You My Love" and "Is This Desire?," it's usually because of production.

Fortunately, the older songs she sang - "Hair", "Man-size", "Down by the Water" - were some of her best. She mixed quieter songs like the prostitute tale "Angelene," featuring Rob Ellis on keyboard, to the powerful "Rid of Me." The latter began iquietly, then moved into head-bopping punk and finally climaxed in the banshee-like "Lick my legs/I'm on fire/Lick my legs/Of desire."

Let's hope that Polly Jean, one of our generation's best and literate rock stars, is still playing on when we're all gracefully relaxing into retirement, remembering the '90s.