Product Description

Seventh album from Yeovil's premier cult indie heroine follows 2004's 'Uh Huh Her' and marks a startling change of direction. Based almost entirely around stark, minimal, repetitive piano and organ figures and featuring almost no guitars or percussion at all, the album stands at the intersection between contemporary classical and Victorian American vaudeville. Sounding like it was recorded a hundred years ago, it proves once again that Polly Jean Harvey is an artist totally out there on her own.

Track Listing

1. The 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. The Piano
10. Before Departure
11. The Mountain
12. Splash Page Live Link

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #792 in Music
• Released on: 2007-09-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced
• Running time: 33 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Polly Jean Harvey you hear on White Chalk is not the wild harpy you heard gnashing and wailing on "Sheela-Na-Gig", or the urbane punk stateswoman of 2000's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. No, this is another evolution in her singular career--one that sees electric guitar banished to the cobwebbed attic, tight cat-suit covered over by Victorian gown, and Polly's yearning vocals sounding strangely removed, like they're being broadcast from another, distant age. Piano is the primary instrument here, augmented by occasional, dusty sounding guitar or other, more esoteric stringed instruments--a sparse, limited musical canvas that places the emphasis on song and lyrics. And while initially, they seem foreboding and slow to open up, repeated spins reveal this to be a set of ghostly power and eerily timelessness. "Dear Darkness" is spacious and supremely measured, Harvey singing of words "tightening around the throat of the one I love", while the harp-accompanied "Grow Grow Grow" is impossibly highly-strung, its pain buttoned-up in constricting corsets and tight bows. Only on the closing "The Mountain" does she approach the cathartic anger of her previous work. But then, White Chalk is something else entirely--an icy English gothic that's powerful in its choked restraint. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

"Austere" and "archetypal"
The electric guitar is traditionally recognized as an extension of the phallus, but the idea of Polly Jean Harvey recording entirely without one sounds like an act of neutering all the same.


Ever since Rid of Me, of course, Harvey's treated the six-string like a stealth weapon rather than a necessary appendage. Nonetheless, its well-timed bursts and sprays always seemed to help engorge her axe-less moments with similar combustible fervor, whether in the sometimes-throbbing beat-work of Is This Desire, the acoustic-and-keys self-possession of To Bring You My Love, or her two most recent, more readily rock-signifying albums.

Learning that PJ's focusing on the piano this time around then isn't necessarily cause for concern, until you actually listen to White Chalk and realize Harvey's ivory-tinkling won't be of the holly-rolling Tori-ish variety, nor will any amped-up geetars be showing up to light a fire under her ass as needed.

But we must come to terms with what we've been given here, and our gift is 34 minutes of archaic whispers and moanings from a woman who's always had a knack for sounding so out of time she can make recent Dylan seem as ripped-from-the-headlines topical as your favorite mixtape rapper.

"Austere" and "archetypal" are the prevailing watchwords. Over the course of eleven songs of grim predestination, virtually no modernizing or even identifying signposts are allowed to disturb the terrain. The title track gives us a path, then tells us it was "cut 1500 years ago." You get the picture.

Bereft of detail then, we're left with elemental feelings and facts of existence--none of which, of course, have ever been too foreign to PJ's oft-essentialist purlieu. Desire ("Silence"), regret ("Broken Harp"), loss ("To Talk to You"), and mortality ("Before Departure") are all investigated with suitable verbal detachment and allusive mystery. Abortion, everyone's second-favorite sensationalist could-it-be topic for parlor guessing games (after masturbation, naturally) is quite possibly implied on the title track as well as in "Broken Harp" ("something metal tearing my stomach out"), and certainly seems to be the subject of "When Under Ether" ("Something's inside me / Unborn and unblessed / Disappears in the ether").

"When Under Ether" is also the album's first single, surely a perverse and perfunctory designation springing from a record of such stark and intense alienation. Still, the melody does manage to insinuate through sheer haunted grace, and the remaining best of White Chalk follows suit, particularly the banjo-driven, echo-laden title track, the instrumentally self-explanatory "Broken Harp" and the truly terrifying "Grow Grow Grow." Vocally, that song features one of the few appearances of Harvey's trademark long snake moan, but she finds other ways to get under the skin as well, blanketing "Silence" in a chillingly ironic refrain of its title and layering a moving falsetto over top of "Dear Darkness."

No 34-minute album should ever drag, but this one undoubtedly does begin to wane as Harvey's melodic nuance falters while her narratives grow more ridiculously obtuse, bottoming out with the cringe-worthy cries of "nobody's listening" in the childhood nightmare "The Piano." Perhaps fittingly, White Chalk concludes with "The Mountain," which offers Harvey's leanest, least-existent melody of the entire record and ends with her wailing like some madwoman of antiquity over, you guessed it, a lone piano.

Don't worry though, PJ. They'll invent electric guitars someday.

Josh Love

Greater than the sum of its parts
With White Chalk, PJ Harvey has eschewed her trademark dirty guitar / sleazy bass / strident chest vocals combination, and discovered a high soprano range and an instrument called the piano. A rather beaten up piano at that.

We are presented with what could easily pass for a musical suicide note, with chalk hills rotting bones and references to unborn children combining with heads being smashed in with hammers and agonised (and final) goodbyes to loved-ones. Yet the effect of listening to such prolonged and deep melancholy is anything but sadness. White Chalk's complex and slightly scary beauty comes from its dogged simplicity and lack of spin - the aforementioned old Joanna punctuates the eeriness with mind-boggling arpeggios (must have killed to play!), while drums, bass and synth are kept to the minimum to keep the sound sparse yet strangely rich.

Within this potentially bleak framework however, PJ delivers across a beguilingly broad range of styles: from the 60s psychedelia of the opening The Devil and the steady folk march of the album's title track through to the mightily impressive rock-esque powerballad of Silence and the fierce wailing of the closing The Mountain, this is a suite of composition that stimulates as much as it challenges.

I normally shudder to make a comparison between PJ Harvey and Tori Amos, but here I'll make two: this album's piano, on which some committed musician no doubt scraped his or her knuckles till they bled, is reminiscent of the sound of Tori's clapped out old piano on Under the Pink's Bells for Her, and the overall rough and unpolished sound can be likened to Tori's subsequent offering Boys for Pele. Comparisons over!

PJ Harvey's head does not appear to be a comfortable space to inhabit right now, judging by the material and the approach taken to realise this album. But boy can she write. This is a quite stunning example of music combining its individual instruments, words, rhythms and melodies, into something greater than its parts - an accomplished and provoking work.

A mature, arresting album; a tagine of loss and memory in a wistful couli.
White Chalk is a great album and one that is especially welcome if it marks a shift towards a more experiemental and yet mature PJ Harvey, someone who has the confidence to move on from the wonderful edge and rip of her past work, which was and is so fresh and vital for the present that created it, to something more considered; work with the same kind of narrative and variety as Dance Hall at Louse Point.

Right, that's MY self-congratulatory, posturing paragraph out of the way. But if you think that one was bad then have a look at the review called "Ethereal in the truest sense" - here's my favourite bit :

'ethereal is precisely what this album is. "When Under Ether" seems to recall an abortion endured semi-conscious while a child's life slips away into nothingness; in other songs she yearns for the companionship of the dead or or begs something unseen for forgiveness. She has "blood on her hands": the white chalk of her native Dorset hills sticks to her shoes. She laments her loss and pain like a banshee or a tragic Hardy heroine.'

Golly! Everyday existence must be a bit of a mare for someone with that level of sensitivity! But I bet Polly herself is well chuffed that there's at least one amongst us who picked up on all the clever stuff what she wanted to reference and that.

Obviously, there's loads I've failed to grasp about this album. In fact, I'm going to have a look at C. O'Brien's other reviews to find out whether I've missed the point completely anywhere else - why don't you too?