SHARON VAN ETTEN - Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

Who wants to live forever?

A synthetic backdrop, a drum machine beat and the limpid voice of Sharon Van Etten addressing the listener, but also herself, inviting us to meditate on the transience of human experience. How do we face the inevitable arrival of death? Well, for Van Etten the first step was to form a band for the first time in her career as a musician, and to write and record an album together with it. An artistic turning point that doesn't just change the American songwriter's compositional approach, but also completely reorients her songwriting towards music cloaked in a dark, hieratic aura. After all, the tribute to gothic rock of the Eighties is already evident from the iconography the cover, video and other visual aspects of the project evoke. "Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory", however, isn't simply a goth or post-punk record, nor merely the recovery of a specific musical and social aesthetic. It is, rather, a brilliant testament to an artist's ability to appropriate different stylistic traits and blend them seamlessly with the American indie rock scene of which she is one of the leading representatives.

The result of this new approach is a tight, cohesive collection, even if the quality of the individual tracks isn't always as excellent as it recently was on "We've Been Going About This All Wrong" or on the now-classic "Are We There". Counterbalancing a somewhat faded middle section, though, is a truly phenomenal opening trio of tracks. While the opening track rises and swells gradually over a chord progression recalling the dream-pop of Beach House, the synthetic pop-rock of "Afterlife" and the indie rock of "Idiot Box" bet everything on immediate, gripping melodic lines. And it's not hard to imagine the cathartic impact the choruses of these two songs could have at the band's future concerts: in an arena, at an outdoor festival or, as Sharon Van Etten would prefer, in a sweaty club.

After the martial march of "Southern Life (What It Must Be Like)", the album closes with two long tracks that both seem to function as farewell songs. This creates a paradoxical suspension right on the final lines of "Fading Beauty" ("The inherent beauty of light/ the fading beauty of life"), which recover the contrast between life and death that opened the record. And here, as the final silence descends, the musician's voice re-enters, reciting, over a subterranean pulse, lines that celebrate the materiality of existence in all its forms. With a gaze that cuts across rocks, oceans, mountain ranges and the bowels of the earth, Van Etten brings together space, time and all the atoms of the cosmos in a single moment of ecstasy. One of the many such moments she has given us in an extraordinary career that, against all odds, continues to surprise us.

And I want you here

Even when it hurts

And I want you here

Even when it gets worse

And I feel the change

And I feel the rage

It sets the stage

A moment

Ride the wave of great music

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13/03/2025