Sharon Van Etten is a bright-eyed, compact, outgoing woman. But the songs on her astonishing new album, “Are We There,” are hardly sparkly—they are slow-moving, efficient vehicles that carry the listener through stages of a long-running and complex romance, which Van Etten seems both to live on and to be trapped in. They tend toward emotional distillation, and are often too intense to admit anything beyond her expansive voice and a single instrument. Van Etten describes intimate scenarios, yet she sings without a hint of either theatrics or excessive restraint. You are instantly her emotional partner, torn between learning from her and wanting to help her out of the maelstrom that she seems to be wandering through. Her vocal range begins slightly lower than that of most female singers, and it reaches up high. But the pleasure is all in the tone, a rich, physically grounded sound that seems to begin somewhere in her legs and to travel up through her body. The effect is not at all stagy—her delivery is a complete articulation of whatever emotion she is feeling in any moment.
In 2009, Van Etten released her first album, titled “Because I Was in Love.” Her subject matter is the tar pit of the long-term relationship, the struggles and the brief glimpses of joy and equanimity. Her début relied mostly on her voice and guitar, with minimal ornamentation. In its phrasing, her singing bears more than a slight resemblance to that of Chan Marshall (Cat Power), as words rise and fall with unpredictable wobbles but largely ride long, pure tones. Compared to her work to come, “Because I Was in Love” is a slowed-down, reduced version of her template. On the song “Tornado,” she creates a wash of harmonies with her own voice; it’s reassuring but not really necessary. She sings, “I’m a tornado. You are the dust, you’re all around and you’re inside. You are the nature, I’m the roar that comes from you.” There is pain at the center of her songs, and also vision, but they haven’t yet been filled out. The shadowy figure who is featured in all four of her albums, her lover and tormentor, is coming into focus. It’s just that Van Etten’s anger hasn’t manifested itself fully.
“Are We There” is the completion of a process that unfolded over “Epic” and “Tramp,” the two albums that followed her début. “Epic,” from 2010, picked up the pace considerably and put Van Etten in a brisk, more luminous context. Guitars are strummed, there is a full band much of the time, and the songs are in a vein of American rock songwriting that is open-minded with respect to form but is largely disconnected from electronic instruments and syntactical gimmickry. (R.E.M., Lucinda Williams, and Neko Case all fall into this very roomy category.) These are acts that disdain conservative impulses but do represent a kind of traditionalism—the idea that the work can be done with songwriting and live performance. Though these artists can sound dissimilar, you sense that none of them will record a dance album.
After “Epic,” it seemed like Van Etten had earned the blessings of all of indie rock’s secular priests. Their approval buttressed the enthusiastic support she already had from NPR and Pitchfork, outlets with the power to encourage people to buy albums rather than just know the artists’ names. “Tramp,” her third release, was recorded with the National’s Aaron Dessner. Her collaborators were so well-known within indie-rock circles that you could be forgiven for feeling as if you’d missed a decade of activity—but it’s simply that her ascent had been accordioned into roughly two years. In that time, she worked with or had songs covered by Justin Vernon, Julianna Barwick, members of the Walkmen, and Beirut’s Zach Condon. An independent musician with only two previous albums had accrued the status of a storied veteran simply by being that good.
On “Tramp” (2012), Van Etten stepped back to a slower rhythm. Her songs burned slightly hotter, and she brought in more sounds, more color. “Tramp” was the first of her albums to appear on the Billboard 200 chart, and its single “Serpents” can regularly be heard in coffee shops.
“Are We There,” which Van Etten made with the producer Stewart Lerman, is a well-paced series of triumphs, interspersed with pleading and occasional moments of romantic bliss. The first track, “Afraid of Nothing,” sounds like the summation of five years of work, a sort of emotional to-do list. Against a backdrop of electric guitar, piano, and strings, Van Etten lays down her state of the union. In her middle register, she sings softly but firmly, “You told me the day that you show me your face, we’d be in trouble for a long time.” The words are stretched out over several measures, and it takes a full minute for the drummer to bring in an actual beat, slow as a funeral march. The piano chords begin to ring louder, and harder. Now Van Etten is asking for change, and pointing to the solution: “I can’t wait ’til we’re afraid of nothing. I can’t wait ’til we hide from nothing.” “Nothing” becomes the repeated mantra, echoed by Heather Woods Broderick and Mackenzie Scott, her backup singers.
She reminds us that this is a relationship that we have been witnessing over the course of four albums: “Turning my way, you show me your face. We’ve known each other for a long time.” Though the subtext is dark, the feeling is almost sleepy and resigned. She sounds like a frustrated mate, not like someone bouncing from person to person looking for love. This is an album that centers on fixing a permanent feature, not searching aimlessly.
On “Tarifa,” which is equally slow, the mood turns genuinely warm, though charged. The song uses the reedy sound of a Hammond organ, and then blends in bass clarinets. Van Etten references soul music as an inspiration for the woodwinds and, though the affinity isn’t initially audible, it becomes more apparent with repeated listening. Van Etten sings alone, lazily, “Shut the door, now in the sun tanning.” Her singers come in, and they finish developing the picture: “You were so just, looking across the sky.” On the chorus, it seems as if Van Etten is in the middle of the best kind of lost weekend, clarinets and voices moving up with her: “Can’t remember. I can’t recall. No, I can’t remember anything at all.”
On “Break Me,” we hear what may be the key to Van Etten’s struggle, a kind of stasis that only couples can achieve. The pace is the same stately clomp, though there is a sonically varied set of instruments countering her voice—a brittle electronic drone, a woody electric bass being picked, a chiming, echo-soaked guitar ostinato. Van Etten is diagnosing something while begging to be released: “He can break me with one hand to my head. He can make me move into a city, taking me as I am, as he lets me in.”
And then, in one verse, Van Etten uses her own pain to turn the knife back on her tormentor, by being declarative: “I am writing about him home. I am. I am writing a song for him.” If this is combat in close quarters, in the dark, how does it turn out? One song is titled “Your Love Is Killing,” and in another, “You Know Me Well,” the chorus is: “You know me well. You show me hell when I’m looking, and here you are lookin’.” But even though it’s one of the most dire lines on the album, Van Etten uses the music to her own advantage, landing on a satisfying major chord for the words “and here you are,” as if to suggest that she won’t budge until this fight is over. Van Etten’s scenarios rarely get better, but the songs grow in size and her voice suggests that as long as this war goes on she’ll remain planted.
“Are We There” is, at the level of innovation, unremarkable. There are no sounds here you haven’t heard before, no radical leaps in the approach to recording or playing. The value is in the execution, the quality of which is made more obvious by the nature of the topic: love—or bad-love—songs. Van Etten goes several layers deeper, and faster, than most songwriters. “Are We There” is the kind of album that many people have been trying to make for years and only a dozen or so have pulled off: words, voice, and heartbreak. ♦
