Album Review: White Chalk - PJ Harvey
- Posted on October 15, 2007 3:08 PM
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Review By Zarina Raja
White Chalk is Polly’s most haunting album so far, even the art work on the album cover is eerie - a Victorian looking PJ with a pale face, painted by a disturbingly blank expression that longs to be read. It is the kind of album that you may expect to hear seeping under the doorway of a creaky old house, infested with child ghosts and a spinster pianist.
White Chalk is a quiet album that slithers its way to the back of your mind, prodding and awakening your hidden, bleak imagery until it manifests itself at the front of your thoughts. This album makes you want to stop in your tracks (and collapse to the floor) whilst the world spins on without you.
PJ Harvey’s ghostly presence wafts towards you from every angle, soft and poignant, and masked in a trembling sadness and suggesting something resembling regret and guilt.
You need to be lying down in the dark to feel the full intensity of this album. If you want to wallow in your pain and misery, then this is the album to do it to. Musically, the album is graceful and beautiful, but terrifyingly dark. All the songs, titled under the same glum theme, The Devil, Dear Darkness, Silence, Grow Grow Grow and Under Ether allow PJ fans to peek into her quite obviously broken heart.
Abortion is a prominent theme that lurks beneath the murky surface of White Chalk, ‘Oh, something metal tearing my stomach out. If you think ill of me, can you forgive me?’ How horrifyingly blunt but gaspingly effective? ‘I lay on the bed, waste down undress. I look up at the ceiling and feel happiness. The woman beside me is holding my hand…something inside me, unborn and unblessed, disappears in the ether, this world to the next.’
I think somewhere there is a feminist message - maybe don’t think badly of me for what I have done, I have the right - but then you stumble across the line ‘scratch my palms, there is blood on my hands’ which pushes us in to Macbeth territory which quite frankly, after listening to White Chalk, I am too emotionally drained to pursue.
Despite White Chalk’s gloomy subject matter, this is an incredibly absorbing piece of music, which is feeding off of PJ’s melancholy. It is brimming with hopelessness and torment, but is addictive and strangely calming.
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