P.J. Harvey

★★★★

White Chalk – Demos

BEGGARS ARCHIVE/TOO PURE. CD/DL/LP

Sketchbook strangeness from the Wessex downlands.

2007’s White Chalk found an increasingly dauntless Polly Harvey treading new ground, ditching raw electric rock for a daringly fragile chamber-folk sound. With songs built around her percussive, rudimentary piano vamps and delivered in a high, haunting vocal register, its bleak beauty and rural mystery recast Harvey as a gothic Dorset seer, summoning spirits both innocent and dark. Stripped of even the album’s minimal decoration, these demos confirm that uncanniness was hard-wired into the songs, with every creak of the piano contributing to the spectral ambience. The spareness serves only to exacerbate the eerie, infant vulnerability of Grow, Grow, Grow, while When Under Ether almost evaporates into its amniotic reverb swirl, and the double-tracked voices on The Devil seem to be more about the evocation of possession than harmonic mellifluousness. Like much here, it’s as starkly compelling as it is ineffably disquieting.