PJ Harvey’s new piano based album, White Chalk, is a radical depart from her earlier works. There are many rock musicians who become annoyed with the sound of guitars in the middle of their careers and decide to pick up new instruments. Often their first choice happens to be the piano. Radiohead has made this step in the late nineties, moving from the guitar-driven album OK Computer (1997) to the keyboard-based and heavily electronic Kid A (2000). The concious choice of picking up unfamiliar instruments is often connected with the hope for new inspiration and a certain »innocence« in the compositional process. Thom Yorke from Radiohead states:
I’m such a shit piano player. I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he’s using. So everything’s a novelty. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn’t understand how the fuck they worked.
In the case of Radiohead, Yorke’s decision clearly took their music to a whole new level, but does PJ Harvey succeed with that, too?
Yorke’s piano playing is very simple from a technical point of view. It is his use of pivot tones, unconventional chord changes and intricate off-beat shifts which makes it outstanding (take this as an example). By contrast, PJ Harvey’s approach is in every way simplistic if not minimalistic. Rhythmically, the songs are built around regularly »stomped« quarter notes. Harmonically, nothing noteworthy happens, either. But still, there is something special about these humble tunes. They’re not just gooey piano ballads. Under their seeming superficiality you will find soul, purity and pristine beauty. With the combination of her minimalistic, over-simple piano playing and her haunting, but never finical sounding voice, she manages to stay distant from cheesy pop clichés. There is something distinct childlike and otherworld about it, something that seems to stem from another time and place. This gets even more emphasized with the effect she puts on her voice and the strange dresses she chooses to wear - on the album cover as well as when perfoming the songs live.
White Chalk may not be the greatest work of art out there. It doesn’t claim to be, either. But something as innocent and yet individual is hard to find in today’s music. After all, who is it to decide that good music has to be complicated? Asked about the white dress she wears on the cover, Polly Jean says that she wanted it to be like a blank canvas, reflecting the simplicity of the record and being very open for the people to project their own picture onto it. This neatly sums up the idea behind her minimalistic songs and maybe behind minimalism in general.
White Chalk, the title song of the new album, performed live.
The Devil, album version.
