Slip-squelching out from beneath the intuitive fingertips of Devra Hoff, they form a terrific backdrop for the way Van Etten twist-turns her way through the emotional problems addressed on the self-titled Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory.
Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic – it’s as though Van Etten has taken a creative stage dive and found herself held aloft by supportive bandmates, who prove more than capable of taking the weight of her ideas while offering lovely, post-punk inflected directional drifts of their own.
Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic – it’s as though Van Etten has taken a creative stage dive and found herself held aloft by supportive bandmates.
If you can go a step further and picture someone repeatedly manipulating those rubbery cubes through a complex series of puzzled sequences, then you’ll have a good sense of how ingeniously gelatinous the bass lines of Sharon Van Etten’s seventh album sound.
The repeated, “Do you believe in compassion for enemies?” is a good question for the 2020s, although Van Etten makes it timeless by nodding back to the (equally philosophical) Talking Heads, quoting the lyric “same as it ever was” from their 1980 hit, “Once in a Lifetime”.
