The final time the world heard from Sharon Van Etten, it was 2022. She was pictured on the duvet of her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Improper, standing in entrance of a home whereas wildfires raged worryingly shut by. The songs lurking inside had been knowledgeable not simply by the environmental disaster unfolding on her doorstep, however the “collective trauma” of lockdown and the fraught complexities of parenthood. It was nicely reviewed and offered sufficient to dent the charts in a number of international locations: enterprise as normal for a perennially acclaimed and influential singer-songwriter. Maybe too normal.
Over the course of her profession, Van Etten has step by step bolstered and rounded out her sound, from the austere acoustic confessionals of her 2009 debut, through trebly Velvet Underground-ish indie, to one thing noticeably greater and smoother, a tasteful – however not bland – tackle widescreen alt-rock: mid-paced, stately, buoyed by synths and swelling choruses. For all of the energy of its songwriting, there wasn’t a lot on We’ve Been Going About This All Improper that her followers wouldn’t have heard earlier than. The laudatory opinions contained adjectives that, considered in a sure mild, might tackle a faintly troubling tone: “snug”, “tried-and-true”, “acquainted”.
In fact, no artist is underneath any obligation to change their method, notably within the twenty first century: in an period of streaming and algorithms predicated on extra of the identical, there’s probably one thing to be stated for sustaining a recognisable model in a crowded market. However clearly one thing has prodded Van Etten right into a rethink. An act of “whole collaboration” from an artist beforehand considered an auteur, her new album presents her not as a solo artist however the frontwoman of a band, who get equal billing in its eponymous title and even have a picture: black-clad, heavy on the make-up, shot in monochrome or shadowy muted tones, they appear a bit goth.
You can additionally apply that description to their sound. Van Etten has hardly shied away from utilizing the 80s as a reference level, however whilst you might think about, say, 2019’s Seventeen soundtracking the tip credit in a John Hughes film, Dwell Ceaselessly sounds extra like one thing stated film’s surly insurgent character may hearken to of their bed room. Digital rhythms clank across the drums; brooding sequenced pulses and arpeggios are topped off with misty synth tones. The guitar is incessantly a spare presence, choosing out harmonics and solitary notes whereas excessive within the combine, and the bass guitar tends to operate extra as a lead instrument than a spine: ought to anybody marvel the place the inspiration for that comes from, Fool Field opens with a short, and sweetly apparent homage to New Order. Van Etten incessantly factors up the breathier, extra ethereal elements of her voice: the flinty, folky tone she used early on in her profession is noticeably absent, as is the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that used to accompany it. On Southern Life (What It Should Be Like), her voice takes on an incanting stridency that recollects late 70s Siouxsie.
There are massive choruses and beautiful melodies that talk to Van Etten’s songwriting craftsmanship, however the general temper is each hazy and just a little tense. That feels becoming. These are songs stuffed with confusion and foreboding, which go away questions unanswered: “Do you consider in compassion for enemies?” “Who desires to stay ceaselessly?” “Why can’t you see it from the opposite aspect?” Afterlife flips between feeling comforted by the continued presence of somebody who’s died and questioning whether or not the lifeless even can stay on. In I Can’t Think about (Why You Really feel This Approach), the sound of a information broadcast is greeted with an equivocal “flip it up / flip it off”, and when parenthood seems as a topic, it’s by way of worry and apprehension for the long run: “My fingers are shaking as a mom, attempting to boost her son proper.” Written and recorded within the UK in 2023, the pervasive tone of insecurity and nervousness about how issues may prove actually sounds apropos proper now.
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Not all the things right here works. Indio’s model of motorik Krautrock sounds just a little spindly and anaemic; concluding the album with two beatless drifts – beautiful although they’re – offers the album an odd form, a way of the entire enterprise tapering off. Then once more, given the temper of the songs, maybe that’s the purpose: it ends uncertainly and unresolved. What comes earlier than that ending feels daring and recent, not an entire reinvention a lot as an sudden left flip that takes the artist at its centre someplace new.
Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Principle is launched 7 February
This week Alexis listened to
Annie-Canine – Please Forgive Me, David Grey
Chaotic however gleaming bed room pop with melodic interpolations from the titular singer-songwriter’s oeuvre: a captivating meditation on how the music you hear as a toddler by no means leaves you.
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