[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

Let’s get the Word out of the way first: difficult. Yes, White Chalk is difficult. And yes, I didn’t like it so much because it was difficult.

But White Chalk wasn’t difficult to listen to; not at all. For that, the reviewers gave us little credit. As if an album without drums or guitars would somehow put people off, when Joanna Newsom was such a hot name barely a year ago. Harps, people. Harps. PJ Harvey banging away at a piano (and, yes, a harp on one song) and singing well above her usual register cannot compare to the oddity that is Joanna Newsom, and if Newsom’s second album, more convoluted and epic than the first, could win near-universal praise, surely White Chalk wouldn’t be so difficult.

A lot of reviews made White Chalk out to be more difficult than even Harvey’s 1998 left turn, Is This Desire? You might remember that album as a claustrophobic techno-gothic nightmare, and I mean that in the best way possible—Is This Desire? is my favourite PJ Harvey album, and the idea of returning to that fertile ground was appealing. But in hindsight, despite the presence of off-putting electric dronefests like “Joy” and “Electric Light,” Is This Desire? wasn’t as peculiar as originally thought either. After all, “A Perfect Day Elise” charted pretty well, didn’t it? Maybe it only looked so difficult because of what followed—2000 Mercury Prize winner Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, one of Harvey’s biggest commercial successes to date behind To Bring You My Love. Maybe the same would be true for White Chalk as well.

First impressions, in fact, are quite good. The first three tracks offer ample insight into the world of White Chalk and offer enough emotional grit to keep the songs in your memory long after the album is over, like good ghost stories that keep you up at night. “Grow Grow Grow” is especially spellbinding, and perhaps the most overtly sinister song of the bunch. (As someone who loved the oppressive qualities of “Joy” and “Electric Light,” this makes a certain sense.) By the time you get to “Broken Harp,” though, you have a very good idea of how the rest of the album will go. Songs begin to blur into each other, and by the time you get to “The Mountain” you’ve lost track of where you are in the album. White Chalk’s range of moods is even narrower than …Is This Desire?, meaning you have to be in a fairly particular mindset to get the most out of the album. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does limit the replay factor significantly unless you live in a frontier forest cabin perpetually lit by candlelight.

That said, Harvey gains points for once again painting a very vivid atmosphere with her songs, something that was missing from 2004’s Uh Huh Her. It’s only because you wouldn’t want to live in White Chalk’s haunted world very often that the album suffers. So, difficult? Not to listen to, for sure. But to identify with? To live with? To immerse yourself in on a regular basis? Maybe there you’ve got something.