RIYL: PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Wye Oak, Beach House
It’s understandable that Sharon Van Etten did her best to downplay the stellar group of indie-rockstars who contributed to her coming out party, 2012’s ‘Tramp’. Get enough famous musicians in your studio and people will start to wonder who really deserves credit for the results. In the run up to its release, the albums producer, Aaron Dessner of Brooklyn’s critical darlings The National, often seemed to headline. After all, Van Etten was a relative unknown then, with two strong but largely unheard albums under her belt.
Fast-forward 5 months and Van Etten is practically top billing at the Newport Folk Fest. She’s played Jimmy Fallon and SXSW, and earned a coveted 4 star review from Rolling Stone. There was an air of inevitability to all of it, like the music world was just aching to find it’s next big female phenom, and for the most part Van Etten offers on ‘Tramp’ fit that bill.
The lead single “Serpents” was everywhere, and with good reason, but a lot of the songs on ‘Tramp’ take considerably longer to grow on you. “Give Out” isn’t one of them, its a sparse and hauntingly strummed love song that makes frank allusions to the self-esteem issues that Van Etten’s fragile voice seems incapable of hiding. These issues are explored with more clarity on “We Are Fine”, her sweet duet xenical drug with Beirut’s lead singer Zachary Condon that plays like an indie response to the Jason Mraz/Colbie Caillat hit “Lucky”.
Van Etten has said she initially felt the wide array of moods on tramp felt schizophrenic, but that she’s since come to see it as a strength. That’s definitely debatable. The dirty secret is that more than a few on the songs on ‘Tramp’ are tiring (Leonard, All I Can) and a couple are just plain boring. Although her singing voice is reliably charming, the self-harmonizing can get a bit grating as well. There’s no question that ‘Tramp’ is a huge step forward for Van Etten, but the patchy songwriting definitely makes you wonder how things might go if she had to get by with a little less help from her friends.
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For More Information Visit:
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http://www.sharonvanetten.com
