Things We Look Forward To: PJ Harvey, White Chalk

There's always so much we love to anticipate about fall: wearing coats and boots, cooler temperatures, that general feeling of purposefulness and endeavor that you get about new projects and fresh, clean notebooks just waiting to be filled with all sorts of ideas and goodness. And there's also the "serious" movies that come out, not to mention loads of records and art exhibitions and bands touring that you just have to catch because you know that in some way, it will change your life. Usually, of course, this doesn't happen, because movies are boring or records are disappointments or people just suck. But life-changing revelation generally happens more often for me in the case of the genius that is PJ Harvey, so this fall I am so looking forward to her new record, titled White Chalk and out on September 24th.

We've loved Harvey going on years now: I can remember driving out on I-90 as a thunderstorm rolled in, listening to the opening chords of her first record, Dry, and feeling like my own private world had come into view for the very first time. And I still have a tape that Liz sent me ages ago of a live Boston show that still manages to startle and wow me like never before. White Chalk is full of ghostly piano melodies and a surprising fragility to those more accustomed to Harvey's guitar and vocal theatrics. It's a succinct and haunted 30-odd minutes of music, with songs exploring mortality, time and, you know, the agonies of love.

Harvey's visual transformations don't get as much ink, but she's just as much of an experimentalist with her image as someone like Madonna or even Cindy Sherman. From her days as a post-punk riff on the riot grrrl for Dry to the fearsome diva of To Bring You My Love to the art-damaged ingenue of Is This Desire?, we've always been interested in her "look." For White Chalk, it appears she's going for a sort of Victorian thing; the recent cover art looks straight out of a Whistler painting:

But in a weird way it's not so different from her take on useless feminine accoutrement that was at the heart of her 1992 video for "Dress," which is still ever-awesome, fifteen years on, and somehow seminal in my psyche for my continual conflicted pleasure in and detachment from overtly feminine fashion:

Posted by Kat in Soundtracks
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