Track Listing

1. Devil
2. Dear Darkness
3. Grow Grow Grow
4. When Under Ether
5. White Chalk
6. Broken Harp
7. Silence
8. To Talk to You
9. Piano
10. Before Departure
11. Mountain

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30711 in Music
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced

Album 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 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.

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

Customer Reviews

A provocative album of lonely beauty.
P J Harvey's stated objective has always been to get as far away from her last album as possible. Which is why, following her accessible album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, she followed up with a difficult and unloveable lo-fi album in Uh Huh Her.
Three years on, and she's travelled even further into experimental territory with a brittle, ghostly folk album that's rich in stark atmosphere but totally devoid of melody.
Based almost entirely around stark, minimal, repetitive piano and organ figures and featuring almost no guitars or percussion at all, the album straddles the boundary between contemporary classical and Victorian American vaudeville.
From the moment it begins, it almost sends shivers down the spine (in a good way) and just keeps getting better the more you listen to it.
The breathtaking title track "White Chalk" (which talks of being buried beneath Dorset's chalk hills) finds Polly even more tender vocally, and set against some fine acoustic strumming. Her soaring vocals midway through prove entirely captivating, while the gentle riffs are a shimmering delight.
The themes of the album aren't exactly bright rays of sunshine: "To Talk to You" is one of the more touching moments of the album as Polly tries to reach her grandmother through song. The first single "When Under Ether" deals with drug incantations and "Dear Darkness" is like an open letter from Sartre.
As ever, the topics are deathly and made all the more brutal and haunting because they're delivered in a fragile whisper to a barren accompaniment.
The album is unsettling, strange and yet hauntingly beautiful.
There are many moments of genuine brilliance here to help you alleviate the day-to-day, and which remind you why people make music in the first place: to share their honesty and imaginative ideas, in a way that's so honest that its authenticity is refreshing.
It's an album cut with plenty of things to transcend you, leaving you in a state of bliss and wonderment.
"White Chalk" may not be the greatest album of all time, it may not be to everyone's tastes, even Harvey's own fans , it may not even be Polly's finest.
But it's a mark of her determination to try new things and continually challenge herself that she's not afraid to be different.
For those new to PJ Harvey this may not be the most accessible album. For those who have followed this far on the journey, "White Chalk" is another wonderful moment - a provocative offering. An album of lonely beauty and piercing sorrow, "White Chalk" is P.J. Harvey back at the peak of her considerable powers.
Give it a chance and you'll come to realise that "White Chalk" is every bit as impressive as PJ's earlier record, but in a more grown-up and mature way.

Inexplicably Lovely
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.

give it a couple of listens
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.