When guitar appears, it can be a disruptor – as with the massively fuzzed and overdriven line that breaks into the verses of You Shadow. Van Etten had tired of the guitar before making Remind Me Tomorrow, and synths and keyboards are the dominant instruments. The choice of US indie’s buzziest producer, John Congleton ( Angel Olsen, St Vincent, Future Islands), was a statement that this would not sound like her previous albums – and it doesn’t. Yet it is also an album that is unsettling, even at its most reassuring. Jupiter 4 is as plainly spoken as a supermarket Valentine’s Day card: “Our love’s for real / How’d it take a long, long time / To let us feel?” In Malibu, Van Etten and her companion are “just a couple of dudes who don’t give a fuck”, cruising around in a little red car. Listen to I Told You Everything on YouTubeĪt times, Remind Me Tomorrow is uncomplicatedly joyous. It wasn’t that Remind Me Tomorrow keeps returning to that part of her past but it seems as though becoming a parent led Van Etten – already a devastatingly intimate songwriter – to look at life in a way that calibrates the joys against the sorrows, to see the darkness but be willing to banish it. “He was an addict and abusive and so I just never knew who I would be coming home to,” she told the Observer earlier this year. She was 17 when she entered a relationship that was to dominate the succeeding years. But isn’t nostalgia for being a teenager one of the oldest entries in rock’s lexicon? “I used to be free,” she sings, “I used to be 17.” It is on finding out more about Van Etten’s life that one realises she might have more desire than most to retrace her teenage steps and wonder where else they might have led. Seventeen is magnificent, yes, in its evocation and evolution of that windswept strain of 80s rock that emerged when musicians who predated punk turned their ears to the new wave. On the face of it, the centrepiece of Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album is straightforward.
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