White Chalk

PJ Harvey traded her guitar for a piano she barely knew how to play, and the strangeness of a musician working outside her fluency is exactly what makes White Chalk feel like a nerve exposed.

She sings most of it in a thin, high register that abandons the growl her earlier records made famous, so a song like "When Under Ether" arrives sounding like it's being pushed out through a fever. The playing on "The Devil" is deliberately spare, a few tolling chords that leave enormous silence around each phrase, and that emptiness does more than any fuller arrangement could. "White Chalk" itself scratches at the Dorset cliffs and buried grief with a directness that feels almost embarrassing to overhear. It's the sound of an artist choosing to be worse at her instrument in order to get closer to something true.