Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Kitty Empire

Sharon Van Etten: We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong review – mid-paced candour

Sharon Van Etten.
‘Indie-rock fug’: Sharon Van Etten. Photograph: Michael Schmelling

Every Sharon Van Etten album drills deep into the grit of struggle and its pearl: resolve. Long a dissector of toxic relationships, this sixth outing finds her happily relocated from Brooklyn to LA, where Van Etten and her young family hadn’t unpacked before they had to see out a pandemic. Her usual scrying of messy innards now comes with an added dimension – that of trying to hold everything together as the world outside upended.

So while 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow pivoted around songs of plucky resilience such as Comeback Kid, … All Wrong offers up a different kind of constancy in Come Back, in which a couple fight to keep their defining intimacy in the face of having to be grownups.

Written pre-Covid and sweetened with birdsong, the elegant piano-and-vocal track Darkish reminds depressives that storms end and dawns break. The album’s uplifting bop is Mistakes, an ode to getting things not all that wrong. Throughout, however, a central issue remains with Van Etten’s music. All these highs and lows pass in an unvarying, mid-paced indie-rock fug, with little to hold the attention outside her gossamer delivery of candour and insight.

Watch the video for Mistakes by Sharon Van Etten.
Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.