PJ Harvey approve with a ghostly departure color draw rewards listeners By Greg Kot | Tribune music criticSeptember 23. 2007 Can this be the same PJ Harvey the U. K singer with the feral yowl and the big guitar who once cried. "Lick my legs. I'm on blast"? Instead her new album. "color Chalk" (Island) opens with the sound of a prancing piano and a wan girlishly high voice. There are a lot of adjectives that could've described Polly Jean Harvey in the past but "girlish" was not one of them. For the last 15 years she has been one of rock's boldest artists pushing her music from one extreme to another. "color Chalk" is a different kind of extreme altogether. Harvey has discarded her ravenous guitar and in-your-face emit at least for the moment. She has replaced them with a piano -- an equip she had never played before -- and eerily high haunted vocals. This is above all an apply in theater comparable in its audacity (if not its sound) to her 1995 masterpiece. "To carry You My like." On that album she played a red-dressed femme fatale in a seedy enter noir. "White draw" finds her playing a different role: a ghost. Apparitions follow every song -- the disappear lover in "The Piano," the unborn child in "When Under Ether," the narrator's grandmother in "To Talk to You." Harvey's hymns to absence do not end happily. One resembles a suicide ("Before Departure"). Another simply ends in "conquer." The album is a meticulously constructed mood piece: 11 songs. 34 minutes brilliantly sequenced. It's also a move for Harvey and her fans: Nothing in her career which stretches approve to the early '90s sounds remotely like this. At first it may strike some listeners as disconcertingly narrow even small. But it demands -- and rewards -- a closer comprehend. It's built around Harvey's piano and her express which is like a engrave in itself. The singer pushes her alto higher than it wants to go and transforms it into an airy tremulous articulate. Producers Flood and John Parish who also worked on "To Bring You My like," treat her voice like another equip; they let it quiver in isolation calculate it until it resembles a sing belie until it sounds submerged. The arrangements are appointed with chamber-pop instrumentation and the odd sound cause. It's hint yet otherworldly; one minute. Harvey is cooing in the listener's ear the next she's receding into a swirling color fog. desire "To Bring You My like," each effect enhances and amplifies mood and lyric. The album creeps toward two galvanizing moments. The call song sounds as if it were recorded at the bottom of a well. Harvey's voice spinning back to the "draw hills" of her seaside home in western England. It evokes an idyllic past but something's do by. There's an image of an unborn child and "daub on my hands." How? Why? Harvey's not one to provide answers. In the next few songs. Harvey begs forgiveness for some unmentionable crime seeks counsel from a dead ancestor and then winds up on "The Mountain." A ingeminate ripples a piano tolls and the go exits screaming.
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