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REVIEWS
LOCA @FORUMZ
Amazing Show. Polly vocals sounded strong and clear. I have to say, I've seen her in the past 10 years and each time she sounds better and better. "Nina" was amazing. So hushed and intimate. I swear that the entire theatre was holding it's breath. My only criticism is that it was a seated show. I wanted to jump around. There is just no way you can be seated while "Man-Size" or "Snake" are being played.
She made some jokes about how playing "Grow Grow Grow" involved all her limbs and orifices. This is because she has to sit spread legged with one leg on the peedle machine thingy she plays, so her dress was hitched wayyyy up.
FROGNAMEDJETHRO @FORUMZ
Goddammmm that was amazing.
I was really floored through most of the show; shaking, nearly crying, then I had to pee so I went during Shame (I think that was a good choice out of everything).
PJ was extremely cute and humbled by the crowd. You could tell that she was actually thankful when she kept saying "thank you. thank you very much" after every few songs. She mentioned how unflattering it was sitting on the stool and playing the harp because she had to use every limb and orifice.
I can't say there was a single weak song in the setlist. Clear stand-outs to me were White Chalk, Man Size, Electric Light, Snake (!!!! she turned up the guitar for this one, belted it out so that her voice was still audible but kind of a violent hiss under the screeching guitar; the lights flooded the stage in green. Fucking amazing. Song of the night for me), Rid of Me, Water and The Desperate Kingdom of Love (which was played after the Piano as the final song).
I wish she was playing more shows, but it seems like she was probably happier and able to put more into this performance because she's not touring like a dog. I feel very lucky to have been at this performance.
BRYBOYNY79 @FORUMZ
I agree with everyone else...such an amazing show. I loved when she made the comment of her audience getting little older and aging like fine red wine I thought the audience was very respectful and I liked that the staff at the Beacon only let people back into the theatre in between songs.
I also liked when she talked about the lyrics being written on her dress...she seemed genuinely happy being there, more so than any other time I have seen her.
STELLAR @FORUMZ
i loved her banging on the cymbal during leah.
electric light was awesome as was her belting out snake with that green light on her.
white chalk was beautiful, i liked the harmonica.
what an amazing show.
and a lovely theater.
LOCAS @PJH.NET FORUMS
I don't think anyone has posted yet about the show last night in NY. I've seen her 3 times in the past, twice on her last tour and at the New Yorker festival last year. I was underwhelmed w/ the Uh huh her performances.
Last night was totally different and absolutely amazing. If anyone's been to a NY concert, you know the crowd is very very tough. When the lights went out before she came on there was a HUGE applause, she came out and under a bright blue spotlight tore it up with To Bring You My Love....it was really awesome and just continued that way throughout the night, I'll write the songs i remember her playing, in no particular order. From her new album grow, grow, grow was my favorite(i think the songs from that album sound better live). it's great to see her so focused and fierce again. she played one encore and made the crowd work for it, my hands were burning after the show.
she seemed pleased w/ the performance and i'm happy new york finally gave someone the appreciation they deserve for a mind blowing set.
and if you like seeing her play guitar---it was heaven.
sorry, i have no pics or videos. i was in the upper balcony and the only negative was the sound was somewhat off(on grow, grow, grow the harp was too quiet i think), maybe on the lower levels it was better.
ROB HARVILLA @THE VILLAGE VOICE
I got a ticket to this show for the sole purpose of manufacturing an excuse to post the video above, which depicts fighting giraffes. You need to see this, I think, these giraffes. Given the terse, seething, deceptively placid nature of PJ Harvey’s new White Chalk—mostly somber piano dirges, her voice high and brittle and largely robbed of its beloved guttural roar—I figured I could cook up a totally sweet metaphor here. Onstage I figured she’d be delicate, demure, unthreatening, and then suddenly there’d be this violent outburst of rage and hostility that would hurt her as badly as whoever she was attacking. Like the giraffes, see. They just stand there for twenty seconds or so, unblinking and unguarded (“You can almost hear them saying, ‘It’s OK, bro, we’re cool, we’re cool,’” a friend observes), and then, without warning, THWACK THWACK THWACK. They are head-butting each other with malicious ardor.
But the Beacon Theatre lights go down, the sold-out crowd whoops, and Polly Jean Harvey, clad in an ornate white dress almost identical to the one she’s wearing on White Chalk’s cover (except, she jokes, this one’s got her lyrics written on it), fucks up my whole giraffe thing in the first ten seconds. Tonight will be all ardor. She is alone onstage, with a majestically surly electric guitar, and she is loud. Jesus. She barrels haughtily through “To Bring You My Love” and “Send His Love to Me” with the husky snarl of a longshoreman and the subtlety of a gong. The crowd is exhilarated. Even when she moves to a Christmas-light–adorned upright piano (with no plate in front, its innards exposed, so you can see the hammers strike the strings within—a slightly more apt metaphor), she pounds through Chalk’s “When Under Ether” and “The Devil” with far more fire than she allows on record—“COME HERE AT ONCE,” she thunders, and we come. Thunderous applause between songs, accompanied by loopy shouts of “I love your dress!” and “You saved my life!” and “Make a live DVD!”
She switches from electric to acoustic to keyboard (with a side of wanton cymbal-bashing) to autoharp, the latter whereupon she indulges us with “Down by the Water.” But she’s best on electric guitar, impossibly loud and visceral and defiant, bashing through “Man-Size” and “Big Exit” (a swinging jaunt superior to the version on my favorite PJ record, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea). This is probably the most intimidating one-person performance I’ve ever seen, all THWACK THWACK THWACK with no pause, no letup. “Snake” is among the scariest 90 seconds of my life. It’s never OK, bro. It’s never cool. So awesome it was riotously funny. Like the giraffes, see.
SADIA LATIFI @NYC ENTERTAINMENT
"It seems like so long I played in New York — ages, really," PJ Harvey remarked to a sold-out crowd at the Beacon Theatre last night. Looking like one of the Brontë sisters in a white frock dress, the indie rocker, now almost 40 (!), performed a motley mix of songs to a reverential crowd at her only scheduled show on the East Coast.
Sans opening act and backing band, Harvey played a 90-minute set drawing from all parts of her discography, with a focus on her minimalist but likable new album, White Chalk. Despite some time out of the spotlight and, well, the effects of aging, her vocal range still filled every square inch of the venue, on songs like the erotic "This Is Love" and the startling "Down by the Water."
Harvey moved around the stage, which was decorated with a few simple Christmas lights, alternately playing the guitar and funking around with amps, keyboards, cymbals, and even a maraca. (2004’s Uh Huh Her featured Harvey on every instrument, save for the drums.) As Harvey had just recently learned to play the piano, a metronome assisted her during the song "White Chalk."
Admitting to having written lyrics down on her dress, Polly Jean joked with the crowd and seems to be markedly less angsty these days. At one point, she told us, "Things get better when you get older." In her case, we're inclined to agree.
PITCHFORK STAFF @PITCHFORK MEDIA
Like the slightly more prolific Robert Pollard, PJ Harvey has decided to grace U.S. audiences with but two live appearances this year, the first of which went down last night at New York City's Beacon Theatre. Adorned in a vintage white dress with writing scrawled on the arms-- not unlike the one she sports on the cover of the just-released White Chalk-- a solo Harvey treated the gathered to selections spanning her diverse catalog, including the raw "Man-Size", alternative rock radio hit "Down by the Water", and plenty of the new Chalk material.
CARRIE ALISON @SENTIMENTALIST MAGAZINE
It’s quite a challenge, emotionally and professionally, to put words to blank paper about PJ Harvey, and feel that any chosen attributions do her justice. So much to say, really, about this delicate piano-playing, autoharp-strumming Bronte. And yet, in all of my speechlessness, I keep coming back to one word: awe.
Harvey inhabits her songs so fiercely, so truly, that it’s impossible to separate Polly Harvey the person from the public perception of PJ Harvey the artist; or what we assume of her to be true, as one of rock and roll’s most private and reclusive personalities. Take the new album title, White Chalk for example. Literally, given her stark, “Book of the Dead” appearance on its cover, and the downbeat sound and vibe of the record (although she considers it upbeat), it would be too easy to assume our Polly has had a rough go of it lately, up there at her cliffside house in the English countryside. But rather, as it has been reported, “White Chalk” actually refers to the color of the hills of Dorset where she grew up, and still resides.
Appearances can be so deceiving, and when Harvey took to the Beacon Theatre’s stage last night in a white, floor-length Victorian gown (replete with embroidered lyrics), it was quite clear that this is a woman at peace, not in mourning. The overtones of the album, the startling use of her higher register, cries of “Oh God, I miss you” and tails of betrayal, are all emanating from a woman of marked serenity. Gone is the blue eye shadow-wearing, Joan Crawford-channeling sexual dynamo in big black boots or pink pumps; before us was a splendidly beautiful, ladylike, barely made-up Harvey with softly tousled hair.
Strapping on a Firebird guitar to regale (or assault?) the audience with two old, beloved hits, “To Bring You My Love” and “Send His Love to Me,” Harvey’s first official New York concert (although solo) in three years was immediately one to beat.
Three cuts from the new album with Harvey seated at the piano followed: new single “When Under Ether,” “The Devil” (”White chalk hills will not rot my bones”) and “White Chalk.” Each fully realized, each so frighteningly vulnerable in spirit, yet she was not. On the contrary, Harvey with her rudimentary ivory-tickling, never seemed more present, or arguably, more brazen.
“My Beautiful Leah” from 1998’s Is This Desire?, with its heavy fuzz and crashing cymbals, always a highlight and a tearjerker for many, elicited impassioned catcalls, which Harvey took in stride. Never much of a talker during her performances, she couldn’t help but react at one point, when she believed an audience member called her “ridiculous,” commenting back with, “Did you say I was ridiculous? I was going to agree with you!” “Shame” found Harvey talkative again, referring to the Uh Huh Her cut and her back catalog as, “The older, the better, like a red wine or whiskey.”
A howling “Big Exit” lead into a surprise minimalist, but nevertheless fascinating recreation of “Down By the Water” on autoharp, elicited more hoots from the audience, but White Chalk’s “Grow, Grow, Grow” (“grow” is the large word scrawled on her dress), “The Mountain,” and “Silence” brought on the waterworks, cementing the evening as a brilliant roller coaster through the emotions, sounds and mind of PJ Harvey.
The encore, with live staple “Rid of Me,” gave occasion to smile at the obvious dichotomy of her belting out a dirty, sexy tune and commands to lick her legs when we can’t even see them. Yet, it works, because Harvey, in all her tumult and shape-shifting, is still just a shy, tender-hearted English lass; but a lass with a galvanizing set of schizophrenic pipes, a guitar, a microphone, and the moody blues, just the same.
MICHAEL D. AYERS @BILLBOARD.COM
Donning the full-length white dress seen on the cover of her latest album, "White Chalk," Polly Jean Harvey played the first of two stateside solo gigs last night (Oct. 10) at New York's Beacon Theatre.
"I brought most of my home with me to keep me company," she remarked early on, referring to the knick-knacks that were seen on top of her piano.
Harvey's set found the singer/songwriter dipping deep into her back catalog, as well as featuring numerous tracks from "White Chalk." Despite the lack of a backing band, she kept the crowd in awe by switching instruments every few songs. Guitar songs such as "Rid of Me," "To Bring You My Love" and "Man-Size," showed a bluesy, grungy side, contrasted by the softer strains of "White Chalk" and "The Devil" on piano.
Harvey also used a harp for several tunes and incorporated pre-recorded beats during "My Beautiful Leah" and "Angelene." Other highlights included a throaty, desperate sounding version of "Big Exit," and the B-Side "Nina In Ecstasy," which Harvey said was "one of my favorites that hardly gets the light of day."
DAVID SPRAGUE @VARIETY.COM
Plenty of artists can command a stage through pyrotechnic trickery or brain stem-searing volume, but there are precious few capable of doing so by merely walking out onto the proscenium -- and none manage to do so more gracefully and effortlessly than Polly Jean Harvey. The singer-songwriter didn't afford herself much in the way of a safety net at the first of two Stateside appearances in support of the breathlessly minimal Island album "White Chalk" (released last week with surprisingly little fanfare). Harvey undertook the perf entirely on her own, dividing her time among piano, guitar and autoharp -- eking a distinctly different emotion from each.
Harvey, dressed in a white Victorian dress styled after the one she wears on the new disc's cover, cut a steely swath through the set's early stretches, allowing the brawny chords of "To Bring You My Love" to ring threateningly through the theater. When she turned her attention to piano, however, the sonic mood -- and the singer's own mien -- changed palpably, with the introspective delicacy of "When Under Ether" (a pleading missive borrowed in part from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets") creating a quicksand-like empathy that only the most jaded could attempt to escape.
In general, Harvey seemed to be in good spirits, joking at one point that the tchotchke-laden stage was her attempt to "bring most of my home along to keep me comfortable." The trick worked, imparting a parlor-like feel to the title track of "White Chalk," on which her harp playing bridged the rather wide gap between the medieval and the postmodern. Ditto for the cautiously hopeful "Grow Grow Grow," on which Harvey sought emotional hand-me-downs with the anticipation of a woman who's discovered a long-lost family Bible replete with buried ancestral treasures.
The Bible -- God, the Devil and all of their various minions -- figured prominently in the 90-minute set's songs, evoking dances of danger ("Down by the Water") and sensual interludes with equal aplomb. There were those in the aud who seemed to be left wanting more given the relatively sparse nature of the perf, but those who waited for the afterglow to wash over them were rewarded immensely.
GINNY YANG @SPIN.COM
Miss Polly Jean Harvey, looking demure in a white Victorian-style gown, played an electrifying set during Wednesday night's (Oct. 10) sold-out concert at Beacon Theater. "I don't know if you can read my dress, but these are the lyrics to my songs," she said while gesturing to the black print on her lengthy skirt. But despite her restrained appearance, Harvey's raw and powerful voice came through in a set that culled tracks from throughout her illustrious career.
The intrepid Brit siren played classics like the growling "Man-Size," the defiant "Big Exit" and the remorseful "Shame." Harvey even sat behind the piano to play several songs off her latest effort, White Chalk, including the delicate and haunting ballad "When Under Ether." The audience could barely contain themselves during the performance and shouted encouraging words throughout the night, including the exclamation "This is ridiculous!" "Did you just say I was ridiculous?" Harvey playfully asked the besotted fan. "Because I was just about to agree with you."
KELEFA SANNEH @NYTIMES
P J Harvey was temporarily flummoxed. “I thought you said I was ridiculous,” she said. “I was about to agree, actually.”
In fact, that’s exactly what he had said: a fired-up concertgoer, shouting his gruff review from somewhere in the darkness of the Beacon Theater. (Everyone’s a critic.) But on this side of the Atlantic, “ridiculous” is often a compliment, shorthand for “ridiculously great” or something. And he wasn’t alone: something about the pauses between songs at a P J Harvey concert inspires people to shout praise at the solitary figure onstage. Are they trying to reassure her? Rattle her? Both?
It doesn’t matter, because Ms. Harvey is a brilliant singer and songwriter and performer, one who usually finds a way to seem supremely self-assured and slightly rattled at the same time. During Wednesday’s concert, she spent a little over an hour murmuring and yawping her songs, accompanying herself on guitar and piano and synthesizer. Then the house lights came on, but people stood and applauded and refused to leave, so she came back for an encore that almost felt unpremeditated. (A photograph of the set list, posted at brooklynvegan.com, confirms that the four-song encore was planned.)
On a day when everyone seemed to be talking about a different British alt-rock juggernaut from the 1990s (starts with an “R,” ends with a “d,” has an “adiohea” in the middle), Ms. Harvey reminded a roomful of fans that she had done something even more fearless than releasing a pay-what-you-want download. Her new album, “White Chalk” (Island), is a bleak collection of quiet, intense little songs; she spends most of it exploring the shaky high end of her vocal register.
There are no guitar heroics and no snarled pronouncements. It’s a hard album to listen to, not because of the songs (which are often lovely), but because playing it feels somehow intrusive, feels like eavesdropping. Part of the concert’s draw was that it offered a chance to see how the quietly unsettling new songs fit with some of the thunderously unsettling old ones.
She got a big round of applause for an autoharp-and-drum-machine version of “Down by the Water,” her 1995 hit, and for a floor-rattling, electric-guitar-powered run through “Rid of Me,” one of her signature songs. But songs from the new album — including “Grow Grow Grow,” an eerie allegory, and “The Devil,” driven by the insistent tock-tock-tock of a metronome — were received nearly as warmly. This wasn’t one of those shows where people suffer through the new stuff.
An old songs she exhumed was “Nina in Ecstasy,” a B-side that she called “one of my favorites”; it was also a reminder that she has long used her upper register to give her songs a touch of ambivalence. And in “The Piano,” from “White Chalk,” she seemed to play up the juxtaposition of her softened voice and that hard opening line: “Hit her with a hammer/Teeth smashed in.” As she ascends, she has to work harder to find the pitch.
Taken together, all the high notes suggest a kind of uncertainty, the opposite of the fierce certainty she was once known for. Or maybe those two things aren’t opposites at all.
UNCREDITED @BLENDER BLOG
After one of many adoring (and vocal) fans yelled out something unintelligible in between songs at PJ Harvey's solo show in NYC last night, the singer gamely responded: "Did you say, 'You're ridiculous?' ... [he didn't] ... I was going to agree with you." And there were several moments during the hour and a half performance that could only be described as ridiculous thanks to the stark contrast between PJ's beaming friendliness ("thank you for playing with me," she gushed) and her pitch-black songs; She would smile and joke with the rapt crowd and then — without pause — launch into something like "The Piano," which features the following opening lines: "Hit her with a hammer/ Teeth smashed in." While absurdly jarring, the juxtaposition worked because both her lighthearted banter and death 'n' violence-themed songs came across believably and without reservation. The contrasts even worked their way into Harvey's dress. The anachronistic, puffy number looked elegant from afar ... but a closer view revealed reams of the singer's own lyrics scrawled right into the fabric.
The one-woman gig doubled as a singer/songwriter masterclass. As if PJ's voice (in exquisite form whether shrieking or whispering) wasn't enough to keep the crowd at attention, she constantly switched things up, moving from electric guitar to piano to keyboard to auto harp to acoustic guitar. Then there was the stylistic variety: She rocked as if she was kicking a dude's crotch straight through his skull on "Snake" and brooded with the despair of a suicidal nun on closer "The Desperate Kingdom of Love." (And every song played from her so-so new CD of ballads, While Chalk, improved on the stage.) High-wire solo shows are risky endeavors with potential pitfalls like self-indulgence and sameness looming large. But, gifted with a versatile, raw nerve delivery, PJ had no trouble keeping everyone ecstatically cheering for songs about unrequited love and dying babies.
EMILHOUSE @MYSPACE
I hadn't known it was going to be a one woman show until I got there. But since 4-Track Demos is one of my favorite albums of hers, I didn't mind at all. In fact, I was kind of excited about it.
The show itself was spectacular. It's not a sing-along type concert. She plays whatever the hell she wants. She played some old, some new, some fan favorites, and some obscure. She mixed it up very well. I like that the show was very basic and raw. Most of my favorite material hers is more on the minimalistic side. I'd put this show right up there with the Tool show I saw last year. In a different way of course.
Below are some of the pictures I took during the show. I tried to capture how the colors changed throughout the show and also how she seemed to glow from time to time. Doesn't surprise me heavenly angel that she is.
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