The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #257

#257: "The Devil" (2007) - PJ Harvey

Playing an instrument she barely knew how to play when she began writing/recording her most asture album (2007's White Chalk), British rocker, chanteause, and innovator PJ Harvey created sixty minute's worth of pop chamber music with a distinctively Victorian feel; it's the aural equivalent of an Edith Wharton ghost story with Charlotte Bronte's dark passions lurking somewhere deep within. Harvey's always had the Bronte part down, but this is the first time that she tones everything back, singing in falsetto, her usually powerful voice barely ekeing out, strained this time, deliberately so, her admitted fears and her repressed desires the product of the protagonist's nature and nurture, and it's all unsettling, as we expect her and the music to just escape from its tiny box and blast away, but it never truly does.

Except for one brief moment near the end--and she never fully lets loose then--Harvey keeps it all contained; it's her most disciplined performance, and it's that discipline that unnerves, as pop songs almost always succeed on depth of conveyed emotion, and in "The Devil," Harvey--on the surface--conveys little. We expect a shout, and we get a whisper. We're kept dangling on the precipace the entire song, and we need release, and we don't get it, and therein lies the power to this song. It's the subtlety and the implied reason(s) for the veiled emotion that eventually start to sink in, and then we're creeped out even further. It was fine at first when we didn't know, but now that we know Harvey is haunted and why, then we know that her devil* is waiting just around the corner, and soon he may get us.

*Note: The titular devil here is metaphorical, of course, but even the knowledge of that fact didn't stop my wife from stopping me playing it the vehicle. "I don't care," she said. "It's just too...I don't know. It gives me the...uh...I mean, uh, it might scare the kids.