White Chalk Reviews



Rolling Stone: 4/5 Stars

"Something's inside me/Unborn and unblessed" -- so, what might that be, Polly Jean Harvey? If you think she's giving a secret like that away, you haven't been listening to her long. On her smashingly creepy White Chalk, she takes to the piano, an instrument she'd never learned to play before. Yet it's stronger and more assertive than 2004's Uh Huh Her, drenched in that Hammer-studios feeling of cloistered Victorian gloom, as if Harvey's a hysteric singing herself to sleep in the attic. The songs aren't knockouts, avoiding the big choruses she does so well. But they have a cold pastoral kind of chill, as Harvey howls about being possessed by demon lovers and ghosts in "The Devil" and "The Piano." In the great "White Chalk," she wanders the hills of her Dorset, England, home where her ancestors are buried, writing their story on her feet as she walks. Harvey ends the song moaning, "Scratch my palms/There's blood on my hands" -- and it sounds like the piano keys have turned into skeleton bones. (Rob Sheffield)

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Spin: 3.5/5 Stars

In 1973 Michael Lesy published Wisconsin Death Trip, an intoxicating collection of images shot by Charles Van Schaick -- the town photographer of Black River Falls, Wisconsin -- around the turn of the last century. Framed by news items illuminating the pictures, the volume is a grim history of madness, murder, suicide, smallpox, poverty, and babies in coffins. But for that particular time and place, these were also the facts of life, which helps explain the book's disturbing beauty.

I've no clue if Polly Jean Harvey has ever seen Wisconsin Death Trip. But her music has always held a similar allure, and never more so than on her eighth solo album, whose cover art resembles a Van Schaick portrait: the singer in a bone-colored Victorian-style dress, gaze steady, mouth expressionless, unmanicured hands folded in her lap. Her stories also recall Lesy's: "Hit her with a hammer / Teeth smashed in / Red tongue's twitching," she sings on "The Piano," a shimmering love song (!) whose tortured chorus simply repeats "Oh God, I miss you" over and over again.

Now, romantic desire's dark and twisted side is Harvey's main creative turf, even when said love seems like a positive thing -- see 2000's excellent Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. The palette here, however, is new. The brash electric guitar, once her signature and sword, is gone; bass lines are few. The main instrument is piano, mostly a humble upright. Harvey adds zither, harmonica, and harp; longtime collaborators John Parish and Eric Drew Feldman, plus atmospheric percussionist Jim White (of Aussie post-rockers Dirty Three), come with gut-string guitars, banjos, wire-brush drumming, and -- just to fuck with the folkie template -- a few washes of Mellotron. Her vocals are downright pretty, sounding more like those of a traditional English singer than the raging punk Medusa of old.

All this may bum out certain fans. But there's a coiled power here equal to Harvey's more muscular stuff. The under­stated, intense modern-ancient balladry -- an approach her buddy Will Oldham often employs -- makes huffing ether ("When Under Ether") or being entered by evil ("The Devil") feel vividly au courant. It's emotional history made palpable.

White Chalk, whose title conjures both the chalk cliffs of Dover and the tracings around corpses on pavement, is short, just 33 minutes. It pulls you under quickly, and you emerge a little queasy. The parting shot, capping "The Mountain," is a devastating scream that seems to be the culmination of all the album's gorgeous creepiness. It also feels distant, as if the record's musical séance is fading, like a radio signal between towns, voices receding back to 19th-century Wisconsin, or wherever misery made -- makes -- its home. (Will Hermes)

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Pitchfork Media: 6.8/10

If there's been a constant in Polly Jean Harvey's 15-year career it's that she seems uncomfortable in her own skin-- which may explain why she sheds it so often. Harvey has a penchant for self-correction, to an almost compulsive degree: After To Bring You My Love made her a marquee act, Harvey released the dark, more atmospheric Is This Desire? When her 2000 album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea accidentally captured the tenor of the times (its songs had an eerily prescient relationship to post-9/11 paranoia), Harvey responded with the stripped-down and studiously raw Uh Huh Her. In recent years, reports even swirled that Harvey was considering retiring, and in at least one regard she temporarily has: White Chalk-- Harvey's most radical self-correction to date-- finds her setting aside the guitar and the blues touches that marked past releases in favor of chamber-gloom, a ghostly piano her tool of choice.

In Uh Huh Her's liner notes, there's a scribbled note from Harvey which reads, "TOO NORMAL? TOO P J H?" On White Chalk, there might be more Polly Jean Harvey than we've ever heard before-- if not quite enough of what traditionally falls under the "PJ Harvey" moniker. One problem is that Harvey isn't nearly as creative a pianist as she is a guitarist. However, the instrument switch has forced her to alter the way she composes as well as the way she sings. From opener "The Devil" on down, she's singing almost exclusively near the top of her range, using the piano as much as for percussion as melody. There are very few distracting trills on "Dear Darkness" or "Grow Grow Grow", where every note rings with loneliness, and the simple repetitive pattern that gently drives "When Under Ether" drips with menace.

The rest of the album's instrumentation is equally spare and strictly old-fashioned, with such mood-setters as broken harp fleshing out (ahem) "Broken Harp"; when some (fake) brass enters the song, it's somber and subdued. Even the scant use of drums is largely intended to accent the songs. While there's probably more room than usual for Jim White, only "The Piano" finds him playing with any force.

Lyrically, White Chalk is oppressively bleak. Harvey's songs never seem as if they come easily; they instead sound like the product of much effort, rigor, and even some pain. Her music is so raw it's a far cry from fun, even when she's trying to be funny; when she commanded Robert De Niro to "sit on my face" in 1993's "Reeling", she made it sound part dare, part threat. But there are no chuckles to be had on White Chalk, which is dark and austere, the songs striking an uneasy balance between indulgence and confrontation.

Despite the presence of regular collaborators John Parish, Captain Beefheart alum Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood, White Chalk sounds as lonely and isolated as any album Harvey has made. There is a rich history of depressing British folk that Harvey taps into here, but without a hint of catharsis, much of White Chalk's miserablism just hangs in the air like a noose. On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world. (Joshua Klein)


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New York Times:

Polly Jean Harvey makes herself almost unrecognizable on her eighth studio album, "White Chalk." She sings in the highest, thinnest part of her voice, and she plays piano more often than guitar; she also dabbles in zither and harp. The album's 11 songs in 33 minutes are often quiet and fragile, closer to songwriters like Bjork, Lisa Germano and Thom Yorke than to the brash, post-punk P J Harvey who released her first single in 1991.

Since then Ms. Harvey has often drawn on the earthiness of the blues, the impact of a beat and the cutting tone of her full voice. This album is a sea change. She has made herself nearly disembodied: a wraith hovering amid the resonances of repeated piano patterns or fluctuating chords. But Ms. Harvey is still a songwriter who contemplates primal matters - death, desire, love, loss, transfiguration - in songs that reach toward incantations.

"White Chalk" revolves around isolation. "Please don't reproach me for how empty my life has become," she sings, unaccompanied, in "Broken Harp." She describes having an abortion in "When Under Ether," then muses, in the title song, about having "blood on my hands." She mourns her grandmother in "To Talk To You," sings about a murdered woman in "The Piano" and prepares for suicide in "Before Departure." For Ms. Harvey, quietude offers no repose.

The music isn't always stark. Every so often, Ms. Harvey layers on cascading keyboards and phantom choirs; "The Devil" and "Grow Grow Grow" shimmer like old Italian movie soundtracks. But the lyrics carried by the album's richest chord is a single word: "Silence." Ms. Harvey, who has a show at the Beacon Theater on Oct. 10, has never sounded so private, or so foresaken. (Jon Pareles)