A Week With P.J. Harvey's "White Chalk": Day 5
19 November 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Jen Pagnini
For all of the empty imaginings this album encourages: the icy fingers pouncing on the keys of the piano which sounds as if it’s reached the end of its better days; the trembling chords and the stiff shock of winter and rain which rattle and quietly crash; the perfect impropriety of a Victorian woman uttering such callous stories which inevitably end with blood on her hands. For every overwhelmingly agonized call for “silence”, there stands in stark contrast the secret admission of a shamed woman. For every coo which, unsteady at first, gains confidences and grows to a shrill howl, Harvey paradoxically pulls you into the warmth of a new voice racked with guilt and pestered to neurotic near-lunacy. The subtle undercurrent of this completely devastating set of songs is what is responsible for the overwhelming competence and accomplishment of White Chalk.
It is comforting to be welcomed into her work of deception: Harvey is warm here, her characters are just like us, their trials and tribulations and endless layers of fearful waves washing over each song: “Nobody’s listening, oh God, I miss you.” We’ve all had these thoughts, though we never talk about them. In an unwelcoming maelstrom of minor keys and unresolved melodies, Harvey has buried her voice and lyrics as the secret which the listener is expected to dig up.
You’ll find yourself in her stories, you’ll put yourself on the edge of these cliffs, looking down at the body below lashed by a roaring sea against jagged rocks. You are at that cliff, toeing it with the wind at your back reminding you how easy the fall could be. She gives us the warmth of a kindred spirit rolling our darker thoughts over and over for us like tumbled-smooth pebbles in a creek.
Pay no mind to the individual pieces (the zithers, the guitar, the broken harp) that create the cacophony of uncertainty surrounding the lyrics and their shallow breathless echoes. These thoughts, this warmth is unique in its depth of emotion…without cloying sentimentality. You’ve been invited inside the mind of a woman who’d been wronged, and had done her fair share of evil deeds, and now plays out her life’s story to you and only you.
By the end of a long week with this artistically enviable work, you will begin to realize that you enjoy the warmth of sharing guilty thoughts and loneliness torn free from all hope. Even more, you will realize that these songs echoing inside her head and now yours, are keeping the both of you company in her formaldehyde brain, which lies exposed only inches from the rotting wood of the underside of her coffin lid, which creaks under the weight of the many feet of dirt under which you’ve been buried.
Which I guess gives you only one option: to be alone, together, entranced by her songs, not even bothering to scream because no one will hear.
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