Three-quarters of the way through the new album by John Parish and PJ Harvey and it’s all kicking off on a song called Pig Will Not. Over some freeform guitar squall, Harvey is demonically intoning the words, “I… WILL… NOT!” over and over, like a West Country she-Hulk in the throes of an exorcism. Then, a brief concession to linear narrative. An angel descends from heaven and takes a disbeliever to task over their heresy: “I am your fairy! Do my will!” Over the continuing noise, Harvey is now barking like a dog.

Seven, maybe eight woofs in, it suddenly hits you what a lonely vocation the respected artist chooses for themselves. A pop singer measures success in gold discs. But who is Polly Harvey going to trust to help her sift the good ideas from the bad? A committee of fans? Her record company? The Late Review?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that she knew him locally before she had made a record, John Parish has always been that confidante. Parish, in turn, says he has always canvassed her views when making his own music. With such a mutual understanding, it must have seemed a great idea to write together. Thirteen years ago, they did just that on Dance Hall At Louse Point, a record whose commercial prospects were reflected by the beneath low-key nature of its release. If bigger things are expected of this collection, it probably has something to do with the reptilian swagger of Black Hearted Love – a song Harvey deemed so strong that, once she wrote a lyric to go over it, she decided it needed an entire album on which to live.

Over the course of ten songs, it becomes clear that Harvey’s approach to Parish’s ideas is akin to a child given a dressing up box. Each piece draws a new persona out of her. On Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen, you’re invited to imagine Harvey sat at an ouija board channeling a tale of hide and seek whose tragic outcome is made explicit by the violent tussle being played out between the guitar’s ascending chords and the descending, capitulating notes of the banjo.

However, following the spooked, haunted dancehall ambience that informs Leaving California (brief précis: “it’s hot and I’m homesick”), it becomes apparent that A Woman A Man Walked By isn’t so much an album as a great EP appended by a series of trying experiments. On a title track, Harvey enunciates a spoken-word tale about a “woman-man with… chicken liver balls” which evokes the performance-art nihilism of Nick Cave’s work with The Birthday Party. There’s a moderately appealing energy to the clattering execution of The Chair and spare waltz-time plucking The Soldier, so why is it so hard to muster anything other than indifference about the idea of wanting to play the songs again?

Perhaps the answer lies in the friendship that brought this album into being. When two people who use each other as sounding boards share the burden of composition, who is left to tell them that they’re barking, so to speak, up the right tree? Over the full course of time, there’s every chance that A Man A Woman Walked By will come to be seen as a mere aberration in an otherwise inspired string of albums, not least the breathtaking desolation of 2007’s White Chalk. That said, it’s hard not to feel a touch concerned. For the next one, Harvey is apparently planning to learn the saxophone.

(Island, TS £12.72)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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