| |
Posted by Ess Bee on October 01, 2007 at 09:11:21:
|
P J HARVEY “White Chalk” (Island) 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, postpunk 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 lyric carried by the album’s richest chorus 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 forsaken. JON PARELES
|
