Album Rating: 4.0

i mean white chalk is a fine record, it provides the cosplay album cover and the windswept cliffs of dover vibes everyone seems to want from pj harvey, but i don't remember anything from it the way i do the wheel

Album Rating: 4.0

"I liked Hope Six but it did feel like she laid things on pretty thick"



maybe it's a bit clumsy in certain parts (i admit medicinals and memorials aren't great), but at least i read about the hope 6 projects after hearing it, at least it's a major artist talking about horror in a literal, direct way

Album Rating: 4.0

I like the music on Medicinals just because it’s so catchy, but yeah wtf are those lyrics

Album Rating: 4.0

As for White Chalk:



Dear Darkness is basically my 2nd favorite song she ever did and encapsulates a lot about why I find her stuff so stand out. In fact each song sticks out fairly well to me except maybe like Broken Harp

Album Rating: 3.7

"lmao all around the world punk bands are releasing songs with zero fucking specificity and somehow this observational album is supposed to supply hundreds of years of context?"

ignoring for one second the number of punk classics that have painted informative, vivid and extremely powerful pictures of specific moments in history, are we really playing whataboutism with zero-effort punk just for the sake of getting a C-tier pj harvey album off the hook

this album engages quite deeply with nationalistic imagery and several specific points in history; if an artist with that standard of political songwriting drops the equivalent of a poverty tourism photojournal where the engagement with each constituent (not particularly comparable) nation is so featherweight that you can barely tell what order they come, she's dropped the ball

hey now youre making too much sense put less thought into the argument please

this is an interesting topic to me: when we do and don’t award style points for difficult subject matter that in theory doesn’t involve the speaker, and what we take away if they mess it up

Anyone remember tune-yards

Album Rating: 4.0

Tune-Yards on Nikki Nack Is awkward because Meryl too often sings as though she’s the black person being discriminated against

clearly we award points when we agree and take them away when we disagree


or fuck it all and take them away every time sjws inject politics into muh muzak

Album Rating: 4.0

Idk I like Tune-Yards politics, but it’d help if she sang in third person more

ive never heard of that band but i completely get what you mean lol

but seriously bob

> this is an interesting topic to me: when we do and don’t award style points for difficult subject matter that in theory doesn’t involve the speaker, and what we take away if they mess it up

is music with a deliberate message much different from other art with a deliberate message?

Album Rating: 4.0

" if an artist with that standard of political songwriting drops the equivalent of a poverty tourism photojournal where the engagement with each constituent (not particularly comparable) nation is so featherweight that you can barely tell what order they come, she's dropped the ball"



i dunno i just felt she got called out for the title track by some politicians and everyone jumped on the bandwagon and ran with it, but i see direct parallels in the song in the area i now live in across the ocean. maybe you see it as vapid or dismiss it as poverty tourism but the work that has come out of it conveys the horror, it does not sound glamorous, it sounds ashamed, and we can agree to disagree that it's featherweight

Album Rating: 4.0

I get ars' take though, I think people could be more invested in the theatrical side of Harvey's work. While it's always present, I always prefer when she tones it down or channels it more directly, so I understand his preference for white chalk or to bring you my love

@park. Hmm. I mean, music isn’t representational, is (to most people) not “of” something in the way visual arts are. The words in music say stuff directly, but the meat of the art is abstract, “of necessity” to an unusual extent—this might sway views on purity and purpose. Using this to hate on political music would be lame, but it seems fair to draw some kind of medium-based distinction. I guess I’m curious why you’re asking

I expected this conradtao review to be nearly his last but it’s like in the middle of his output chronologically. Let’s do the time warp again

Album Rating: 4.0

We should hang with conradtao more

Album Rating: 4.0

Also for the love of all that is decent can a Staff member review new PJ already

> I guess I’m curious why you’re asking

sorry i actually wasnt nearly clear enough

i guess i wanted to draw comparison between "the lyrics in music that has lyrics and is clearly putting some effort into saying something with the lyrics" and the message in a lot of narrative-based or character-driven media such as books, film and tv. the reason i asked is because intuitively i'm not sure they must be treated that differently? like i came into this topic with the assumption that music that does not care to do anything with its lyrics is simply outside the scope of the conversation

i was definitely not looking to compare music in general (viewed through what makes music music) with purely visual art so thats my bad for not being explicit

I think we mentally separate lyrics from music quite a bit. Whether we should is a different question. At first I thought maybe hip hop beat+lyrics structure encouraged us in this direction, but classical and jazz standard stuff is super heavy on the split credits too, so that you could even be like, “that’s a beautiful chord from Rodgers, but Hammerstein put a really stupid line over it.”

Hmm. Maybe. What do you think?