Queen of confessional pop captures the nation’s mood
Pop Sharon Van Etten Roundhouse, London NW1 ★★★★★
Sharon Van Etten’s heart was broken; now, it seems, it’s fixed. Remind Me Tomorrow is the fifth album from the New Jersey-born musician, the smartest of the American female confessional singer-songwriters that emerged in the early 2010s. But where she spent the last decade lacing complaints about love with irony and pith, she’s recently spoken of finding motherhood and, with it, a measure of peace.
At London’s Roundhouse, Van Etten’s brighter outlook was clear. She moved around the stage, dancing in starts, like a punky fawn. From the first song, Jupiter-4 – named after the Eighties synth on which much of the latest album was composed – there was a keen momentum, carried on the instrument’s drone, which added a kind of thudding fun to her standard maudlin tone.
Then again, Van Etten’s music has always had an ambivalence at its heart: it’s all about being honest, but it’s built on tension and unease. In her early albums, Epic (2010) and Tramp (2012), she made that her structure: a steady strum on the guitar became a runway from which her voice could take off and swoop and return.
Those old beauties haven’t gone. A treat on Tuesday night was One Day,a confident number from Epic, played on Van Etten’s bright red guitar Ruby. (“You’re not retired yet,” she whispered to it before she began.) “One day, you’ll be in the ground,” went the lyrics. True: but one person’s fear or another’s wish – hard to say.
In the songs she performed from Remind Me Tomorrow, the ground was more open. In Comeback Kid, the lead single – “I’m the comeback kid!” – Van Etten’s band drove her, rather than playing support. Brash drums and flighty guitars held up her voice, as she bounded pugnaciously about. Its synth work, gloriously heavy, is the mark of producer John Congleton.
Frustratingly, there were lapses. As early as Jupiter-4, those synths and drums briefly fell out of step, and it happened again and again. The mood Van Etten casts is easy to break; her lyrics can tack close to nonsense, too, which makes the right kind of sense when the spell is cast, but soon dissolves when it’s gone.
For the most part, though, this was a woman lit by new fire, and able to encompass her past: a dual creature that the crowd were happy to see. Van Etten approached a rare scream on Seventeen, a complicated tribute to the years she spent, as a teenager, in an abusive relationship. “I wish I could show you how much you’ve grown,” she sang, and you believed her.
But the high point, oddly, wasn’t one of Van Etten’s own songs; it was, instead, the best thing Sinéad O’connor ever wrote. Towards the end of the set, of all the possible covers, she gave us a strident, tear-jerking Black Boys on Mopeds. “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses,/ It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds…”
Maybe Van Etten, with her new relationship and baby boy, didn’t mean to catch our nation’s current mood. But here was the kind of song that suddenly hit you, and reminded you what pop music can mean.