reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » PJ Harvey - White Chalk

PJ Harvey's eighth album, White Chalk, is the soundtrack to an inner-suicide. Harvey's move from power-grinding blues to strictly piano transduces velocity into a lasting inertia.  Although it is beyond beauty, the album generates far more of a desolate sound, far more of an acceptance of her since fought loneliness, and far more of an album that teases the skin into feeling, only to gradually take that feeling away.    It serves as a staggering metamorphosis of instrumental, lyrical, and out-of-range vocal expression.  As she sketches away her odyssey with a call to "The Devil" and  "Dear Darkness," Harvey distracts us with a clever deception of hope in "Grow, Grow, Grow."  Her plangent, soprano howl of "Teach me how to grow," are the last words she gives to us before she withers away, song after song.   "To Talk to You" reaches her hollowed core, as she opens with, "Oh, grandmother, how I miss you.  Under the earth, wish I was with you."  By the time you reach "The Departure," her acceptance of death and solitude will mutually comfort you, and you won't even realize it until her piano climbs up "The Mountain" with a quiet finality.  The chalkboard in front of you will be a haze of white dust, and you won't be able to abandon the vision for days to come. – Crystal Farina