White Chalk

PJ Harvey’s career has been marked by artistic risks, but on her seventh album she leapt into the unknown, teaching herself the piano while using it to compose arresting elegies. The sparse instrumentals on the ghostly title track and the startling “When Under Ether” float around her hushed, upper-register mourning; the moaned refrain “Oh God, I miss you” adds a claustrophobic element to the seething rhythms of “The Piano”. <i>White Chalk</i>’s stunning quietude comments on and depicts grief’s ability to turn life inside-out.