White Chalk

PJ Harvey | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 2, 2007)
• Original Release Date: 2007
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Island
• ASIN: B000SFYUV2
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,244 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

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

Product Description

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 contributors from Harvey's long time associate Eric Drew Feldman, and Jim White from The Dirty Three.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Inexplicably Lovely October 17, 2007

By Example: Mark Twain

Format:Audio CD

Can't say why this album appeals to me so much, I wasn't expecting to like it. "Is This Desire?" was the last thing she put out that I enjoyed, and I'd kind of given up on her (and music in general). Currently, though, "White Chalk" is possibly my favorite Harvey album to date. The production is simple, unadorned, perfect for the songs. The arrangements are sparse, but extremely subtle and well conceived. Hardly ever do I hear an album where I feel like every note and drum beat has been placed exactly where it needs to go, with nothing extra and nothing left out. Leaves me a bit floored, actually.

As for the lyrics: yeah, they're hell for bleak and depressing and uber-personal. On another album they might be too much for me to take, but here, with this music, she manages to make it work (for MY earholes, at least). An album so clearly private and confessional, I feel lucky just to be privy to its contents.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a dagger, but a rope April 24, 2010

By Vargiu Riccardo James

Format:Audio CD

Upon listening to this album in 2007, when it first came out, I immediately realized that there was something special about it, and thought it would continue to speak to me year in and year out. Some time has elapsed, and I can say that my prediction has held true thus far. White Chalk is a jewel, one of those rare works of art that transcend genre and give voice to emotion with impeccable intellectual honesty.

PJ Harvey delivers a collection of eleven perfect tracks, which combine to form a moving, if mysterious, story of abandonment and sorrow, of gloom and doom. Whereas the overall narrative may be elusive -- it's hard to say whether the premise is the loss of a child and subsequent departure of a companion, the demise of one parent and folly of the other as witnessed by a young girl powerless to keep disaster at bay, betrayal and heartbreak, or none/all of the above -- one track passes the torch to the next, creating a seamless succession of scenes. These are without doubt pages ripped out of the same book, where cohesion and absolute integrity are used to good effect.

With commendable lyricism, mastery of the language worthy of the best poets, brevity both beautiful and intense, PJ Harvey depicts a journey not from here to there, but from one state of despair to another. Half ghost town in the West, half heath in Dorset, this is a lonely place, yet one many adults will inhabit sooner or later. The mood is dark, but also uniquely epic (not dissimilar to some passages of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, although the comparison may seem far-fetched to some). The instrumentation is not suggestive of any grandeur (or of any aspiration to grandeur, for that matter), but most certainly conveys a sense of solemnity and of ladylike dignity in the face of disaster that I would indeed term grand.

This work is not confrontational: even in the rare instances in which bleak composure is supplanted by loud despair, it is so obvious that no one (not even the moon) is there to listen to the heroine, that her cry never ceases to be inward. This album is not about the moment in which tragedy occurs, or is first discovered, either. It's about the aftermath of tragedy -- about its effects on this human soul.

In a manner of speaking, the heroine doesn't shout, but rather stares blankly: that's what makes her so scary, and so convincing. Pain takes on the guise of annihilation. It gnaws at her soul, draining it of any joy or willpower. It is cloaked in whispers and good manners, but ever present in the background. And internalized, silenced and bottled up, it seems somehow more permanent -- invincible even. While she soldiers on to a march-like rhythm on a few tracks, it would sometimes seem that her ultimate resolve is not to resolve this situation at all, but to let it swallow her whole. Any effort to the contrary is useless, and all former solace insignificant. Darkness is dear, invoked as the only possible remedy.

To be sure, there is a victim in this story, who comes to her death not by bludgeoning or by other unladylike blood-spilling. The weapon here is not a dagger, but a rope.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars give it a couple of listens October 4, 2007

By V. Cherata

Format:Audio CD

This is an album that you need to listen to a couple of times - you'll see, it will grow. You'll be humming the songs and not know where they came from. It's different from what she's done before; I would associate it with most of 'Is This Desire' - and 'The Slow Drug' from 'Uh Huh Her'. So if you liked those albums and are willing to give this one time, you'll probably like it. If you like the rockier stuff, you can always still pick up her brilliant but overlooked '4-Track Demos' from 1993.