PJ Harvey - White Chalk

has been consistently jaw-dropping since ever since she crept on to the music scene in 1992 with her almost scandalously good debut album ‘Dry’. A new album from PJ Harvey is one of the most tantalising prospects you can hope for, and so of course we listened to this new offering (her eighth studio album) like over-excited toddlers on Christmas morning.

If it’s balls out, howling at the moon, twisted rocker Polly Harvey you’re after then ‘White Chalk’ will come as something of a shock. For she has put away her guitar for a while and chosen to sit at a piano stool instead, pouring her heart out in an altogether different but no less compelling way. Right from the opening chords, the first thing that strikes you is the disconcerting but hypnotic combination of fragility mixed with a supernatural strength and power. Some of the songs (‘Grow Grow Grow’) are so soft and they are barely there, yet are just like a spider’s web: delicate and yet full of ominous and deadly intent. ‘Silence’ is the feeling your heart might break with every new beat, relentless piano driving home the bittersweet pain. ‘To Talk To You’ – in which Polly yearns to have a conversation with her dead grandmother – is almost too much to bear, as if you are intruding on another’s most private and lonely moment of grief.

We have to admit – shamefully – listening to ‘White Chalk’ we miss the rocking Polly a bit too much. We’re pretty sure you’re not allowed to say this, but it can’t be denied – her raw power is missed. Until slowly you realise that her power hasn’t dispersed – it’s just emerging in a different form. A PJ Harvey album based around the piano is a remarkable thing and certainly strikes you down, bewitching you so that you can’t stop listening even if you try. ‘White Chalk’ occasionally gives a glimpse into a grotesque nightmare, and the next moment it’s breathlessly beautiful and then again sometimes simply too harrowing to listen to. But by the end you realise Polly has somehow effortlessly wriggled her way deep under your skin once again like you always suspected she would.