A Week With P.J. Harvey's "White Chalk": Day 4
12 November 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Jen Pagnini
White Chalk is an album of emotional outbursts; it is often wintry, icy and uncomfortably surprised at its own penchant for tight-lipped delivery.
Mostly an organic album, Harvey’s ninth studio effort uses electronics tastefully by tucking a sting or flourish almost unnoticeably between the homegrown, folkloric instruments. The mellotron, keyboards, and mini-moog fit seamlessly within the bed of harmonica, broken harp, cig fiddle, zither, piano, banjo and acoustic guitar.
The album’s title track writhes as Harvey builds tension by forcefully denying any instinct to scream her heart out, as she may have in the past. She has admitted to her goal, this time around, as one of consciously avoiding any retread of previously covered territory. Maybe that is why these songs sound as if they have been created so full of purpose and intention.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Harvey said: “It’s so easy to repeat yourself, and particularly the more work you’ve done; it’s easier to write a song you’ve already written ten years earlier but slightly differently. Over the years you know how to make even a not very good song work okay and I didn’t want to do that. I found the best thing to do is put yourself in quite a fearful situation. I so easily could have put drums and bass all over this and shaken a tambourine in choruses, and it would have been completely different.”
Very true.
If you had to hear only one song on this album as representative of the whole, I’d point you toward the title track. Here is a song which begins simply enough, an acoustic guitar strummed without pretense. Then Harvey’s voice circles round elegantly, echoed, and, much like a butterfly: not long for this world and impossible to pin down. Soon a banjo is plucked, the harmonica makes its entrance, the layered vocals swoop in, and a healthily arranged composition is born. It is over the final 30 seconds of the track that the decomposition begins. Then we are left, again, with only the voice of our artist lamenting so much, like a ghost given ample time to regret before disappearing to some other plane:
“Dorset’s cliffs meet at the sea/Where I walked, our unborn child in me/White Chalk horse scattered land/Scratch my palms/There’s blood on my hands.”
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