White Chalk

Regular readers of this blog know I've been watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman movies lately. Well, I've found the perfect musical comparison to his bleak, despairing films: PJ Harvey's latest album, White Chalk.

I've been a fan of Harvey's for a long time, ever since she burst on the scene with Dry, and To Bring You My Love I consider one of the best records of the nineties. I've seen her in concert twice and one of the oddest moments I've ever experienced concerned her--I was in line at Tower Records, buying one of her CDs, and realized she was in line behind me. I suppose I could have said, "Hey, I'm buying one of your records!" but I don't work that way. Instead I did my damnedest to see if I could get her to notice I was holding one of her CDs. If she did notice, she never said anything.

Her output since then has been somewhat erratic. I loved Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, while Dancehall at Louse Point and Is This Desire didn't do it for me. I realize now she put out a record called Uh-Huh Her that I totally missed.

As for White Chalk, well, I'm not sure what I think. It is spare, bleak and yet hauntingly beautiful. The cover depicts Harvey in some sort of spectral pose, and that's appropriate, as this collection of songs is about loss and death. The opening lines of the opening song, The Devil, are "As soon as I'm left alone, the devil wanders into my soul.' The second song doesn't get much cheerier, as it's called Dear Darkness: "Dear Darkness, won't you cover me again?"

The instrumentation for these songs is minimal, usually just a piano, and Harvey's voice is in a high range, almost a keening. In the title track she despairs about her home, Dorset, which is where the White Cliffs of Dover are located: "White chalk hills are all I've known, White chalk hills will rot my bones." This theme of earth as a place where we all end up is repeated in To Talk to You, in which she mourns her grandmother: "Oh, grandmother, how I miss you, Under the Earth, Wish I was with you."

This is the kind of stuff that could push an unbalanced person over the edge, but I don't want to make it seem as if it isn't brilliant stuff. It is very good, but it has a whiff of the sepulchre. I also wonder if Polly Jean needs a hug, considered this lyric from Broken Harp: "Please don't reproach me for how empty my life has become."