New day rising

Singer-songwriter shifts gear on her fifth album. By Victoria Segal.

Sharon Van Etten

★★★★ Remind Me Tomorrow JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP “NOTHING WILL change,” Sharon Van Etten sang forlornly – and, as it turned out, incorrectly – on her last album, 2014’s Are We There. This was also where the singersongwriter attempted a tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s hardscrabble romanticism on Every Time The Sun Comes Up. “I washed your dishes”, she sang, “but I shit in your bathroom” – lines that came across as less a statement of domestic bliss and more as an unruly threat. On Remind Me Tomorrow, however, she relates another household vignette to very different effect: “I walked in the door/The Black Crowes playing as he cleaned the floor,” she sings over Malibu’s tidal piano. “I thought I couldn’t love him any more.” The sun is up, but she’s no longer in trouble. Even if you didn’t know the details of Van Etten’s recent life – a return to college to study psychology, a foray into acting with supernatural series The OA, a 19-month-old son (“it’s a lot,” she tells MOJO wryly) – Remind Me Tomorrow quickly makes it clear that a great deal has changed. The startling Comeback Kid comes on like a Bauhaus Sexy Boy, while the beautifully phrased You Shadow has all the mechanised bulge and crunch of Flaming Lips. It’s a long way from the minimal shading of 2009 debut Because I Was In Love, or 2012’s Tramp: a real rupture with her past. Van Etten’s music has always been precisely arranged and delicately balanced, but her songs have, in their unhappiness, often felt deliberately untethered, blurry, emotional storms scattering into clouds and rain around the edges. Remind Me Tomorrow, though, feels full to the brim, flooded to the top with experimental colour and texture, drones and drums and synthesizers. The disembodied Julia Holter mantra of Memorial Day or the low-lying Cure gloom of Jupiter 4, suggest the undone, unravelling sadness of her earlier work, yet the heavy gothic casing gives them an armour her songs have rarely had before. There is some loss of the raw intimacy that came with her earlier albums, but the new solidity makes sense: this is an album interested in permanence,

in keeping a steady course rather than running away, in holding your nerve and holding on. The Low-like I Told You Everything hints at the cost of making yourself entirely vulnerable to another person, but also finds the redemptive rewards – “You said ‘Holy shit/We almost died.’” The album crystallises in the dreamy trip-hop of Stay, begun for her partner, completed for her son: “You, you love me either way/You stay”. A lot has changed, but it’s exciting to see Van Etten opening up her songwriting, putting a stake in different ground, the old earth of heartbreak turned over, new roots put down.