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.
