Sharon Van Etten 'We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong'
Sharon Van Etten
Among Sharon Van Etten’s many recent collaborators—Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, Norah Jones—the most obviously simpatico are Courtney Barnett and Angel Olsen: like her, they’re female singer-songwriters consciously raising their voices and staking their places above the pop-cultural din.
Van Etten’s sixth solo album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, resharpens the clarity of her voice, which can waver, turn husky, soar into the clouds, and drop like a dense weight—but which rarely abandons melody and which never abandons emotional sensitivity.
That sensitivity has widened Van Etten’s musical panorama, and her latest long player continues sweeping across the vista. The first song, “Darkness Fades,” starts as a simple, echoing duet between her half-hushed vocals and a lonesome acoustic guitar, but then a band suddenly, yet unobtrusively, enters the space and she responds with power and yearning.
In the last song, “Far Away,” Van Etten yearns again, perhaps for the same companion, but with a machine-steady beat and expansive cymbals behind her, she can be more consistently pensive and even hint at a little hope as dawn seems to rise over the last few notes.
Between those two points of yearning, she asks for understanding from her child over deeply simple piano and beats both organic and artificial (“Home to Me”); seeks out a feeling in something like a drag-king hiss until bursting into a Kate Bushian moan across a magnificent coda (“Born”); and accepts happy accidents with lusty New Wave funkiness a la Grace Potter or recent Erika Wennerstrom (“Mistakes”).
With Van Etten handling most of the root tracks herself—co-producing while playing several instruments, particularly keyboards—she manifests her inner Depeche Mode Goth, Tori Amos sensualist, Patti Smith poetess, and more. However, those inners are part of the whole Sharon Van Etten, and We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is all right, and all hers
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