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Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sharon Van Etten on adding the band name to the marquee
It wasn't just about reconnection after an extended period of uncertain isolation, either. The singer viewed that degree of closeness and engagement with the process as a way of offering her musicians ownership over the material: 'As a band, they give up so much to leave their friends and family behind to support your ideas. This is another extension of me wanting to write songs from the ground up and share in that creative process and show the love and hopefully help everybody feel that much more invested and cared for and looked after.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up That sense of communal togetherness was key to 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory,' a seventh album and a debut all at the same time. The band (which plays Advertisement 'I think the most surprising thing to me was that it was really natural,' Van Etten says. 'On my previous records, I've written by myself. I've built it up by myself. There was nobody telling me when I had to finish writing songs, because I would have a collection of songs. At band camp, however, Van Etten was less precious about having to know what she wanted before the band entered the equation. With the musicians using their chosen instruments to explore rather than fill in an existing framework, they came up with chord progressions that the singer would find melodies for and develop. 'There were moments where I helped define what was happening next, but they were naturally playing things that I was very inspired by,' says Van Etten. 'It felt very intuitive.' Advertisement Intuitive though it may have been, the new songs mark a substantial break from Van Etten's previous work. If the sharp and propulsive 'Mistakes' felt like an oasis of danceability on the otherwise expansive and atmospheric 'We've Been Going About This All Wrong,' then 'Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory' is all oasis, sort of. Krautrock and post-punk influences abound, from Neu! and Can to the Cure and Joy Division, and Van Etten likens 'Live Forever' to Even nominally familiar ground comes with new elements. 'Fading Beauty' has some of the same slow momentum and spacious build as Van Etten's earlier work, but it's filled with textures that are new to her, and 'Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)' finds her using her voice in ways that she hasn't tried before. She credits the spontaneity of the band process for the latter. 'It was more rhythmic [ideas] that I was trying to mess around with, and they had this kind of proggy jam happening,' Van Etten says. 'I was just trying to play around with patterns and syncopations, and I felt like it was getting repetitive for me, melodically, so I was like, Where can I go from here, where it kind of sounds like a different instrument? And that's when I go high. And I think also I don't normally do a lot of talking-style singing, so I was just trying to experiment with that. Again, not knowing it was for anything. Advertisement 'When you have that freedom, or that sense [that] it's not being recorded for a record and no one has to hear this beyond this circle of trust here, I think you just throw as much paint as you can. I didn't know what would stick.' Perhaps it's that level of trust that leads Van Etten to refer to the Attachment Theory not just in terms of camp but in terms of family, referencing their 'sibling dynamics' and seeing each other as a traveling support system. But if that's not enough, there's plenty to be found on the road regardless. 'You'll probably see my sister at the [Roadrunner] show. If I'm [on the] East Coast, some Van Etten will be there. I think my dad's bringing, like, ten people to Philly,' says the New Jersey native with a chuckle. 'So I'm always prepared to have a relative at a show. And I feel so fortunate to have such a supportive family, even when it gets hard to see them all. 'I did have a cousin at a Bowery Ballroom show [in New York] get a little drunk and yell 'You [expletive] slut!' at the front row, and I had to explain to everyone around her that it was my cousin just messing with me. But it was very funny, and she hasn't lived that down yet, my cousin Jackie.' SHARON VAN ETTEN & THE ATTACHMENT THEORY At Roadrunner on Thursday, May 1. 8 p.m. Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@ or on Bluesky @ Advertisement
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.
