5' 4" Queenie

Artist: PJ Harvey
Album: White Chalk
Label: Island
Release Date: October 2, 2007

A recent ad for White Chalk, the new PJ Harvey record, boasted – without quotes – that some people are calling it one of PJ’s greatest albums. The vagueness of the claim made me wary.

For the last 15 years, PJ Harvey has always managed to sound relevant, while producing some of the most consistently challenging material. Despite her constant reinvention, each incarnation has still sounded quintessentially PJ - all naked swamp blues lust, raw Gothic (with a capital “G”) desire and pious undertones.

Another commonality of Harvey’s catalog? Greatness. Over seven studio albums, PJ has arguably had very few misfires. If anything, her work has only suffered in comparison to her other works. (Is This Desire? And Uh Huh Her are excellent, but fall short when held up to their immediate predecessors). Such is the case with White Chalk.

On this, her 8th studio album, PJ has reimagined herself once again, and the result is more ethereal than and as emotionally bare as anything she’s done.

The production is quiet and open. The songs are predominantly piano, occasionally augmented with sparse percussion and the occasional zither, or acoustic guitar. (There isn’t an electric guitar in sight.) Gone is the feral wail, in its place, a delicate falsetto.

The cover photograph, of PJ, looking dour in a conservative 18th century gown gives the first hint to the record within. How much of her songwriting come from her own life, I don’t know, but here, the girl sounds positively depressed. She skirts the fine line between moody and morose, and falls too often in the latter. Throughout, she sounds more fragile than frail. More despondent than degenerate. More desperate than depraved. They are subtle differences, but it’s an emotional course that she’s navigated more effectively on previous go rounds.

In a few spots on the album, PJ’s despair sounds almost whiny. The refrain of “Oh God I miss you” in The Piano, and the repetitive “Can you forgive me?” and “Sorry” in The Broken Harp make you want to buy her some ice cream and tell her to just get over it. The mournful caterwauling through the end of album closer “The Mountain” is haunting and unsettling, but seems more consciously avant-garde than evocative.

When she hits though, the results are stellar, as on opener “The Devil”, “Dear Darkness”, first single “When Under Eather”, and the beautiful title track. “To Talk to You” evokes latter-day Radiohead; and on “Grow Grow Grow”, possibly the best song on the record, PJ sounds less like a feeble Hardy heroine, and more like the jilted ghost bride at the beginning of the Haunted Mansion ride.

The album is certainly a grower, and, clocking in at just over thirty minutes, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to squeeze in repeated listens. It will most likely garner massive critical acclaim, and it might even win PJ a new generation of smudged-eyeliner-wearing woe-is-me teenage girl fans.

White Chalk is a very good record. Is it “one of PJ Harvey’s greatest”? Let’s just say that it’s in the top eight.

PJ Harvey will probably do a larger tour next year, but in the meantime she’s only doing a handful of dates to promote the album. One of them is in Los Angeles! Catch her at the Orpheum on October 15.

Here is Polly playing the first single live: