SHARON VAN ETTEN - Tramp

Something truly elusive lingers about a figure like Sharon Van Etten. Repetitive and all too skin-deep in her lyrics, uncertain and never quite distinctive in the way she writes her songs, her secret may lie in her voice - though even that's hard to call intense, hemmed in as it is between evident expressive limits and a certain languor, somewhat bored and boring, in airing her complaints and invectives.

And yet Van Etten managed to captivate the Dessner brothers, with whom she holed up for several months to record her new album, "Tramp", released this time by Jagjaguwar. One can certainly understand how she's become a leading artist on the American scene; it's just still hard to pinpoint why.

Her style is in fact ruminant, oblique, not cleanly dark the way her lyrics would suggest, amid a jumble of accusations of cowardice and assorted crimes hurled at some unfortunate ex-lover. Often also quite laborious, as in the opening "Warsaw": lacking, in short, that creative spark that should make the album's music shine, even amid its rancor and pain.

Aaron Dessner gives it his all, cleaning up and polishing as much as possible the cumbersome yet somewhat insubstantial scaffolding of "Tramp", trying to find that emotional involvement which, in theory, is supposed to be the focal point of the record's experience. He's helped in the task by the dry touch of Matt Barrick of the Walkmen (unmistakable in the cadence of "Magic Chords"), along with Julianna Barwick, Zach Condon aka Beirut, Doveman and Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak. In short, drums deployed at full power, ready to light the fuses of Van Etten's compositions.

The moment almost never arrives, even though here and there a promise survives, albeit one that generally goes unfulfilled. A case in point is "Serpents", written with a whiff of The National about it (though it turns out they too borrowed from the Walkmen, hence Barrick's presence), in which the New Jersey singer-songwriter's struggle to adapt to the record's full-bodied style becomes apparent, her delivery so drawn-out, yet with no room for variation, with extremely limited space for interpretation.

Next come the Beirut-esque "Leonard" (with Zach himself popping up later on "We Are Fine") and, again, the Molina-like brooding of "In Line", but despite its faint melodic insights and richness of arrangement, "Tramp" struggles to take off. Things are much better, though doubts remain, in the more minimal guise of "Kevin's", even if a sense of heaviness, of ponderousness, continues to haunt Van Etten. So much effort, for so little?

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27/01/2012