P.J. Harvey

Sometimes listening to PJ Harvey is like hearing the dead girl from one of those early American murder ballads rise up and start singing her side of the story. It can be an eerie experience, alternately grueling and enlightening -- but always interesting. White Chalk is what it sounds like -- dense, opaque, somehow old -- and it seems to mark you as you listen. While Harvey's primeval rage hasn't been extinguished, her caterwauling mutes to a feathery whisper, and the piano adds a hint of sweetness. She wails that "nobody's listening" on "The Piano," but you know we are, Polly.

"Something's inside me/Unborn and unblessed" -- so, what might that be, Polly Jean Harvey?
If you think she's giving a secret like that away, you haven't been listening to her long. On
her smashingly creepy White Chalk, she takes to the piano, an instrument she'd never
learned to play before. Yet it's stronger and more assertive than 2004's Uh Huh Her,
drenched in that Hammer-studios feeling of cloistered Victorian gloom, as if Harv... More >