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Well, the new album White Chalk has been out a little bit now, and having listened to it intently and tried to write up some thoughts, I got about halfway and then left it alone for a fortnight. Which might be telling.
I’ve heard it described as avant-garde dark folk; it’s certainly stripped down: piano, harp and Harvey’s voice… well, dominate’s not quite the right word, they’re the instruments most used to intrude on the silence. 34 minutes long in total, most of the songs are around 3 mins long, several are less, some end abruptly or just seem to fade away. Newsnight Review called it dark and intimate - and strangely I think it’s the opposite of those things. If anything I think it’s isolated without being solipsistic, the songs are unwelcoming, bleached white cliffs the listener washes up against, whilst paradoxically the lyrics continually dwell on need and absence, without the empowering contrasts present in previous works. Darkness, too, at least could be welcoming, or enclosing, but I got more of a sense of exposure from the album, a too early walk on a painfully stark Dorset morning, the singer left alone with her questions.
Listening to some of the preceding albums again, I think I’m beginning to understand it as a transitional work. The vibrancy and exuberance of Stories, to the unpolished, questioning Uh Huh Her then the fragility and doubt of White Chalk. The sparsity of Is This Desire sounds positively lush in comparison. The movement in that album, between distant images, but images of longing, being carried along by the music between, evokes a simultaneous emotional separation and yearning, can be contrasted to White Chalk, which seems not static exactly, but one where movement is frustrated and broken up, made minimal. Silence is the only track that really seems to develop a conventional sense of progression, and even that’s limited.
Gone are the shouts, yelps and seductive whispers of past albums, and in their place is an insubstantial, limited register that almost pleads for attention. Her voice sounds weak, and given the amount of time spent in the studio one can only assume it’s purposefully meant to sound that way, extended beyond its normal limits. Personally I didn’t find it “haunting” or “beautiful” or any of the other compliments that would be appropriate to the material, it sounds strained, disconnected, brittle – it’s interesting but not pretty. Brittle is the word that keeps coming back to me with this album, it’s almost at the point of breaking-ness, and I can’t see how the songs will be incorporated with the others in a live set in anything like the same tone they maintain on the album. While Uh Huh Her falters into hesitancy about halfway through (in my opinion), listening to it again the songs themselves are quite good (again as above there’s a cracking version of You Came Through which shows off the power in the song that the album misses) and contiguous with past ones. I’m struggling to see where those moments are in White Chalk, Grow Grow Grow has moments where you think it’s going to launch into something that demands more attention, before it’s reeled in and dissipates. It’s definitely an album that seems to demand a different method of listening than the others, but both Harvey and her material sound as if they’ve done everything possible to strip away strength and power from these songs, so it’s an album without what I sort of suggested up above as one of Harvey’s strengths: the tension she creates between desire as an absence of something that she’s powerless to retrieve and her ability to exert control over that desire, and to exert power generally. It’s that sense of power and control that I’m not getting here, basically.
This is the first Harvey album I’ve listened to where I didn’t feel carried away – I can see that Harvey’s trying something new, taken a new direction, but not one that has much emotional resonance for me. But I’m also struggling to understand who exactly this album is for. I’m on my third listen now and it’s starting to grow on me, I know that I’ll be humming bits of When Under Ether for the next week, but I don’t particularly like the song, and I can’t imagine the sort of mood I’d need to be in to stick the album on in the future. It’s undeniably interesting for what it is, although I’m not sure I’d ever describe it as powerful (again, almost the opposite) but neither the faux-Victorian mad-woman-in-the-attic introspection, or the faintness of voice Harvey has adopted for this album have really convinced me of this direction’s merits, or that it's really intended for a wide range of listeners. Part of definitely me wishes that she’d turned the material into a one-woman play, recorded a different album, and hit the road with her boots on. Disparate moments in the album are becoming more memorable and interesting, encouraging further listens, and then I hit stinkers like Broken Harp where I wonder if the whole thing’s just woefully misguided and self-obsessive. But then, it’s generally been given good reviews, so maybe I’m just struggling to adjust. Did anyone else have thoughts? |
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