Love Lies Bleeding
Rock’s chameleonic queenie visits a deathly quiet place BY WILL HERMES
PJ Harvey
White Chalk +++½

ISITLAUNEDS MYSPACE

In ¹⁹⁷³ Michael Lesy published Wisconsin

Death Trip, an intoxicat-

ing collection of images

shot by Charles Van

Schaick—the town

photographer of Black River Falls, Wiscon-

sin—around the turn of the last century.

Framed by news items illuminating the

pictures, the volume is a grim history of

madness, murder, suicide, smallpox,

poverty, and babies in coffins. But for

that particular time and place, these

were also the facts of life, which helps

explain the book’s disturbing beauty.

I’ve no clue if Polly Jean Harvey has ever

seen Wisconsin Death Trip. But her music

has always held a similar allure, and never

more so than on her eighth solo album,

whose cover art resembles a Van Schaick

portrait: the singer in a bone-colored

Victorian-style dress, gaze steady, mouth

expressionless, unmanicured hands folded

in her lap. Her stories also recall Lesy’s:

“Hit her with a hammer / Teeth smashed

in / Red tongue’s twitching,” she sings on

“The Piano,” a shimmering love song (!)

whose tortured chorus simply repeats “Oh

God, I miss you” over and over again.

Now, romantic desire’s dark and twisted

side is Harvey’s main creative turf, even

when said love seems like a positive thing—see ²⁰⁰⁰’s excellent Stories From

the City, Stories From the Sea. The palette

here, however, is new. The brash electric

guitar, once her signature and sword,

is gone; bass lines are few. The main

instrument is piano, mostly a humble

upright. Harvey adds zither, harmonica,

and harp; longtime collaborators John

Parish and Eric Drew Feldman, plus

atmospheric percussionist Jim White

(of Aussie post-rockers Dirty Three),

come with gut-string guitars, banjos,

wire-brush drumming, and—just to fuck

The album pulls you
under quickly, and you
emerge a little queasy.

with the folkie template—a few washes

of Mellotron. Her vocals are downright

pretty, sounding more like those of a

traditional English singer than the raging

punk Medusa of old.

All this may bum out certain fans.

But there’s a coiled power here equal

to Harvey’s more muscular stuff. The

understated, intense modern-ancient

balladry—an approach her buddy

Will Oldham often employs—makes

huffing ether (“When Under Ether”) or

being entered by evil (“The Devil”) feel

vividly au courant. It’s emotional history

made palpable.

White Chalk, whose title conjures

both the chalk cliffs of Dover and the

tracings around corpses on pavement, is short, just 33 minutes. It pulls you

under quickly, and you emerge a little

queasy. The parting shot, capping “The

Mountain,” is a devastating scream that

seems to be the culmination of all the

album’s gorgeous creepiness. It also feels

distant, as if the record’s musical séance

is fading, like a radio signal between towns, voices receding back to 19th-

century Wisconsin, or wherever misery

made—makes—its home.

ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY DECOSTER

STAR RATINGS +++++ CLASSIC ++++ EXCELLENT +++ GOOD ++ FAIR + POOR