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Chicago Tribune
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: It was a more poised and ready Sharon Van Etten at Salt Shed
Sharon Van Etten is ready to be front and center. Not that she hasn't been before, but perhaps the type and scope of her music made it more difficult for her to command the stage. But with her band, the Attachment Theory, as evident at Friday night's set at the Salt Shed, audiences can now witness a more confident and self-assured version of Van Etten, one who is ready and perhaps eager to embody her true rock superstardom. As a long-time fan, I wasn't quite sure what to think of this new direction, first heard on her self-titled record with her collaborative band, the Attachment Theory, released this February. But it's a pivotal moment in Van Etten's career. And it all comes together in the live show. This is not Sharon Van Etten pretending to be someone she is not. Instead, it is an artist embracing the person she was always meant to be, and doing it with a level of fun and flirty humor that encourages her audience to let loose. There was no cell phone in sight as Van Etten and the Attachment Theory entered the stage and performed the opener 'Live Forever.' A hypnotic purple light show complemented Van Etten's elegiac voice that pierced through the track's spindly synths. 'Holy moly!' Van Etten exclaimed after the audience's rapturous applause. Van Etten's enthusiasm spilled over into the next track, 'Afterlife,' where she began walking around the stage and interacting with both the band and the audience. It was a perfect fit for this new music, which has a certain vibrancy that invigorates the ear. On 'Idiot Box,' a post-punk stunner from her new record, Van Etten returned to her signature guitar. But she lets loose again on 'Comeback Kid,' from 2019's maximalist record 'Remind Me Tomorrow,' continuing to shake up the routine of her traditional stage shows. Van Etten leans into dancing. It's nothing too serious or refined but embodies a driving, propulsive energy, as if the mood of the track is running through her limbs. It's no wonder the infatuated audience began moving, too. Van Etten is as much singer-songwriter as she is frontwoman as she is band leader. And the Attachment Theory, with all of its effortless bombast, is the perfect accompaniment for this new stage in her career. Sometimes it is other people who push us in the ways we need to be pushed. If before she was often grouped in a community of millennial, indie rock singer-songwriters like Angel Olsen or Mitski, here Van Etten has proven that she is more than the assumptions of lazy music industry types who can't or won't see her for who she is. Take 'I Can't Imagine (Why You Feel This Way),' another track from her new record, a new wave-inspired sound inspired by David Byrne and the B-52s. Synth-driven and amusing, it's a sparkly and vivacious track that elicits a sparkly and vivacious performance. There were slower moments, of course. 'Trouble,' with its steady cadence and unnerving musicality, served as a nice transition before the group performed more of Van Etten's older tracks. It's easy to get swept up into the emotions of her music, whether old or new. Fan favorites like 2014's 'Every Time the Sun Comes Up' and 'Tarifa,' (which she dedicated to filmmaker David Lynch) fit perfectly with her new music. Van Etten's siren-like melodies are evocative. But more importantly, there's a throughline in this new music. It's cinematic and epic, a walloping collection of earthy soundscapes that home in on the intricacies and intimacies of life. Sometimes, that comes with a little bit of a groove and a dance, and sometimes it requires the listener to stand present and still. Either way, it's great stuff from an artist with many more surprises up her sleeve.
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory album review – back in rock mode, with a twist
There's only the odd mention of parenting on Sharon Van Etten's new album, co-written for the first time with her band, the Attachment Theory. But early years imprinting – one aspect of attachment theory – has lasting echoes in adult behaviour, and what we do to each other has long been a theme in the American singer-songwriter's compelling work, so much so she trained as a counsellor and has ambitions to be a psychotherapist. After a period hanging out with country-leaning fellow travellers such as Angel Olsen and Margot Price, Van Etten is back in rock mode for her seventh album overall, but with a twist: this record's tonal choices often favour wafting, almost gothic resonances. Synths hover, Van Etten's voice swoops; everything is gauze in a draught. There has always been something wonderfully smeared about her melodic voice, but the icy shadow in which everything here is cast often distracts from her searching songcraft, so replete with queries and ruminations. Southern Life (What Must It Be Like) is winningly mantric, one instance of simpatico between track and treatment. But Van Etten is on far more substantial 80s ground with Idiot Box, which has the scope and heft of Bruce Springsteen.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory album review
The last time the world heard from Sharon Van Etten, it was 2022. She was pictured on the cover of her sixth album, We've Been Going About This All Wrong, standing in front of a house while wildfires raged worryingly close by. The songs lurking inside were informed not just by the environmental catastrophe unfolding on her doorstep, but the 'collective trauma' of lockdown and the fraught complexities of parenthood. It was well reviewed and sold enough to dent the charts in several countries: business as usual for a perennially acclaimed and influential singer-songwriter. Perhaps too usual. Over the course of her career, Van Etten has gradually bolstered and rounded out her sound, from the austere acoustic confessionals of her 2009 debut, via trebly Velvet Underground-ish indie, to something noticeably bigger and smoother, a tasteful – but not bland – take on widescreen alt-rock: mid-paced, stately, buoyed by synths and swelling choruses. For all the strength of its songwriting, there wasn't much on We've Been Going About This All Wrong that her fans wouldn't have heard before. The laudatory reviews contained adjectives that, viewed in a certain light, could take on a faintly troubling tone: 'comfortable', 'tried-and-true', 'familiar'. Of course, no artist is under any obligation to alter their approach, particularly in the 21st century: in an era of streaming and algorithms predicated on more of the same, there's doubtless something to be said for maintaining a recognisable brand in a crowded marketplace. But clearly something has prodded Van Etten into a rethink. An act of 'total collaboration' from an artist previously thought of as an auteur, her new album presents her not as a solo artist but the frontwoman of a band, who get equal billing in its eponymous title and even have an image: black-clad, heavy on the make-up, shot in monochrome or shadowy muted tones, they look a bit goth. You could also apply that description to their sound. Van Etten has hardly shied away from using the 80s as a reference point, but while you could imagine, say, 2019's Seventeen soundtracking the end credits in a John Hughes movie, Live Forever sounds more like something said movie's surly rebel character might listen to in their bedroom. Electronic rhythms clank around the drums; brooding sequenced pulses and arpeggios are topped off with misty synth tones. The guitar is frequently a spare presence, picking out harmonics and solitary notes while high in the mix, and the bass guitar tends to function more as a lead instrument than a backbone: should anyone wonder where the inspiration for that comes from, Idiot Box opens with a brief, and sweetly obvious homage to New Order. Van Etten frequently points up the breathier, more ethereal aspects of her voice: the flinty, folky tone she used early on in her career is noticeably absent, as is the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that used to accompany it. On Southern Life (What It Must Be Like), her voice takes on an incanting stridency that recalls late 70s Siouxsie. There are big choruses and lovely melodies that speak to Van Etten's songwriting craftsmanship, but the overall mood is both hazy and a little tense. That feels fitting. These are songs filled with confusion and foreboding, which leave questions unanswered: 'Do you believe in compassion for enemies?' 'Who wants to live forever?' 'Why can't you see it from the other side?' Afterlife flips between feeling comforted by the continued presence of someone who's died and questioning whether the dead even can live on. In I Can't Imagine (Why You Feel This Way), the sound of a news broadcast is greeted with an equivocal 'turn it up / turn it off', and when parenthood appears as a subject, it's in terms of fear and apprehension for the future: 'My hands are shaking as a mother, trying to raise her son right.' Written and recorded in the UK in 2023, the pervasive tone of insecurity and anxiety about how things might turn out certainly sounds apropos right now. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Not everything here works. Indio's brand of motorik Krautrock sounds a little spindly and anaemic; concluding the album with two beatless drifts – lovely though they are – gives the album an odd shape, a sense of the whole business petering out. Then again, given the mood of the songs, perhaps that's the point: it ends uncertainly and unresolved. What comes before that ending feels bold and fresh, not a complete reinvention so much as an unexpected left turn that takes the artist at its centre somewhere new. Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory is released 7 February Annie-Dog – Please Forgive Me, David Gray Chaotic but gleaming bedroom pop with melodic interpolations from the titular singer-songwriter's oeuvre: a charming meditation on how the music you hear as a child never leaves you.
