Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Every time Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten releases an album, it’s an opportunity for the listener to check out her state of mind. An intimate setting like The Library, was the perfect platform for her selection of unguarded, confessional narratives, in a set which drew heavily from her most recent release Are We There’.
Both set and album opener Afraid of Nothing, builds slowly on the piano and recounts a relationship under strain. It’s a departure from the guitar-driven Americana of her previous record and Van Etten’s vocals are powerful yet delicate. Taking Chances is atmospheric and the soul-tinged Tarifa is a stand out track. It’s a euphoric, yet despairingly sad tale about a holiday she took with her former lover – the relationship ended not long after the completion of the recent album.
The audience are offered a small amount of respite from the storm clouds, when she plays I Don’t Want To Let You Down, a track rejected from her latest record for sounding too happy but which apparently met with her parents’ approval.
As the band are temporarily dispatched to the sidelines, she is upbeat and banters with the audience, before playing a couple of solo numbers, including the memorable Remembering Mountains – a piece of music she composed to a set of previously unrecorded Karen Dalton lyrics.
Recent single Our Love was a showcase for her trademark harmonies, which she shares with keyboard player and backing singer Heather Woods Broderick. The set was closed with the raw melodrama of Your Love Is Killing Me. The lyrics don’t make for easy listening, yet the song is gripping and powerful.
Van Etten and her ‘gang’ as she describes them, did return to play a couple of numbers from 2011’s Tramp album. The excellent Give Out, a tale about moving to New York, which was dedicated to a couple who befriended her in a local restaurant before the gig and the vicious, pummelling Serpents.
On the evidence of this performance, Van Etten is a songwriter who seems to have been through the mill but has emerged on the other side stronger and more secure.
Dean Vernals