PJ Harvey - White Chalk
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CD Details
Artist: PJ HarveyEdition: Music CD
Format: Enhanced
CD Release Date: 2007-10-02
Music Label: Island
Soundtracks:
- The Devil
- Dear Darkness
- Grow Grow Grow
- When Under Ether
- White Chalk
- Broken Harp
- Silence
- To Talk to You
- The Piano
- Before Departure
- The Mountain
Music reviews of White Chalk
Music Review: these hills will rot your bones
Rating: 4 Stars
With or without some spectral lyrics, I was going to get a ghosty feel from White Chalk anyway. This is the first time I've visited this page. 10 seconds worth of seeing the number of stars in previous reviews already told me what I've quietly suspected for the past year or so. This is probably PJ's most controversial album thus far. Right off the bat, there's barely any guitar. If you're expecting/needing some of PJ's gritty post-punk-blues types of songs, just keep on moving along because this isn't that.
While I don't rank this as highly as 2 of my very favorite albums of the past year, Carla Bozulich/Evangelista's Hello, Voyager and Dandelions On Fire by Simone Massaron and Carla Bozulich (available on this site but for some reason it won't let me insert a product link for this cd), I can't give it 3 stars. At 33 minutes it's more of an EP than an album. An EP of melancholic beauty where you don't feel like you're listening to a cd so much as you're hearing a solitary, haunted piano drifting down from your attic. Not that it's only piano and vocals, but piano is the dominant instrument.
At the very least I would have thought every PJ fan probably loves the title track. How does someone not? It and a couple other tunes here (I'll let you find them on your own if you buy the cd) would be devastating, I'd think, were they played at or after the funeral of a friend. Most of the times I've listened to this album I find myself just sitting there 5 minutes after it ended. Somehow sad but not with a heavy heart. I do wish there had been a lyric sheet included (or at least posted on her site) because I haven't picked up on everything she is saying, but it's okay. Sonically, this music is somewhere I need to go.
Description of White Chalk
White Chalk is PJ HARVEY's eighth studio album and first new material since 2004's critically acclaimed Uh Huh Her. PJ Harvey went into the studio late last year to record and produce with Flood and John Parish. The three had worked together previously on the GRAMMY nominated To Bring You My Love and on Is This Desire?. White Chalk also includes musical contributions from Harvey's long time associate Eric Drew Feldman, and Jim White from The Dirty Three.
The album highlights PJ Harvey's incredible ability to consistently create a unique, yet always impactful experience with each new album. Her talents as a songwriter, musician, and producer have never been as powerful, or profound, as on White Chalk. The songs are wonderfully mesmerizing, leaving a hypnotic effect on the listener.
This carnival ride to the netherworld of the soul is PJ Harvey's most dizzyingly radical work since the raw pulse and grind of her 1993 debut. It's also entirely different. Harvey's created an emotionally fractured Gothic fairytale that rides on her spare, tattered piano playing and her voice, which she turns into a fragile siren's call: high, airy, and imperiled, and made otherworldly by a labyrinth of echo. Instead of pop tunes, Harvey offers an 11-song cycle that's the metaphorical story of a breakup in which the Devil, a drug-induced nightmare, and a seemingly bottomless pit of despair all play a part. At the end, in "The Mountain," her banshee wails conclude a journey so oblique it's worthy of David Lynch or Neil Gaiman. Flood, who co-produced Harvey's 1998 epic rock breakthrough Is This Desire? with her, reprises that role, but White Chalk is more chamber music--and a dark chamber at that. --Ted Drozdowski
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