The Art Question

Waking up Sunday morning, I opted for a pair of jeans and Columbia boots — careful to avoid tripping over my abandoned, imitation Manolos that had already caused me enough bodily harm for one weekend. As many fierce Middlebury females have done before me, I faced the ice-storm Saturday night to show my dedication to the arts, live music and free alcohol. Unfortunately, I also face-planted in my four-inch heels. Luckily, black-and-blue matched my dress. But when it comes to art — whether it dons the form of fashion, theatre, jazz, choreographed dance to the tequila two-step or even manifests itself in the naming of an architecturally deviant building — where do we draw the line between the aesthetic and the asinine?

PJ Harvey treads the line between ludicrous and laudable as deftly as she balances her boyish bob with her vixen voice. Often associated with the aching intimacy of Tori Amos and the bizarreness of Björk, the British-born singer/songwriter has spent her career flirting on the edge of eccentricity — to the point of occasionally alienating her Lilith Fair followers.

Starting her career in the early '90s, Harvey cooed, purred and roared in a fashion that would have made Cobain himself smile. In 1995, she ditched her two male bandmates and noisy, masculine melodies, releasing her first solo-endeavor, To Bring You My Love — a record that sold over a million copies and heralded the praises of publications ranging from the Village Voice to The New York Times. Harvey decided that she was not meant for a mainstream marriage, however, and traded her black sweaters for pink ball-gowns and vampirish make-up. But despite her evolving penchant for spoken-word, spooky tracks such as the single "The Wind" featured on the Broke Down Palace Soundtrack, and her hard-to-swallow subject matter covering dismemberment to religion to sex, Harvey has still endeared herself to the critical circle. And regardless of its eeriness, her newest release, White Chalk, somehow transcends its avant-garde tendencies to deliver tracks that are downright addicting.

Harvey's eighth release, White Chalk abandons the searing guitars and keyboards of Uh Huh Her and settles for the parlor-esque tinkling of the piano accompanied by the rare appearance of acoustic strumming. With vocals like a wraith and cover art quintessentially Bronte, the album steeps itself in the Gothic horror and romance tradition — simultaneously able to lull the listener into a reverie while sending shivers through the speakers with Harvey's whisperings. "While Under Ether," the release's first single, turns a hallucinatory haunting hymn about abortion into a beautiful ballad while the title track tampers with folk vibes, implementing simple, repetitive lyrics laid over an ever more austere guitar. But despite Harvey's constant shedding of skin and innovation of genre, the album can become tiresome. "Broken Harp" and " Before the Departure" are snore-inducing in their sparseness, and she demonstrates more dexterity with the guitar than in her manipulation of the piano. Still, White Chalk is refreshingly modern in its old-fashioned odes to British folk, and playing at around a half-an-hour in its entirety, Harvey parlays pretension into marketable music.

In his address Saturday evening, Kevin Mahaney '84 mentioned the importance of making art accessible to everyone. And while PJ Harvey's creepy poetics and eerie, ethereal voice may seem estranging on first spin, she quickly captures listeners with her confidence and the enticing intimacy of her songs. While no To Bring You My Love, White Chalk proves that, despite the ghost-like wispiness of its tracks, Harvey's solo career is alive and well while asserting her influence on the prog-rock scene — an influence that will be hard to erase.

"White Chalk" PJ Harvey
"When Under Ether" PJ Harvey

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