![]() ![]() Van Etten flirts with a range of different pop approaches on Remind Me Tomorrow, but keeps things reined in enough to make this a beautifully cohesive piece of work. It’s a completely gripping line that leads into a gorgeously restrained ballad, but it’s not necessarily indicative of what’s to come on the record. You almost died’,’ she sings in ‘I Told You Everything’. ‘ Sitting at the bar, I told you everything. Now, she’s followed that record up with perhaps her most gripping set of songs yet. Its songs soared and the quality of the record saw Van Etten pick up more much-deserved acclaim. Her 2014 record Are We There was not only her most popular, but it was her finest hour to boot. That combination of calm focus and chaos perfectly encapsulates the album, and probably Van Etten’s past few years.Sharon Van Etten’s gradual growth over the past 15 years or so has cemented her as a songwriter we can trust. In “Seventeen,” which could be to a 17-year-old or to her younger self (or both), she sings, “Down beneath the ashes and stone/ Sure of what I’ve lived and have known/ I see you so uncomfortably alone/ Wish I could show you how much you’ve grown.” Toward the end, the song climaxes with some throat-shredding singing that was put in dramatic relief during her appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel” earlier this week. ![]() The songs, not surprisingly, reflect the massive changes the past few years have brought her. “Remind Me Tomorrow” is electronic-based without ever sounding like dance music it’s atmospheric and cinematic and evocative without ever distracting from the songs.Īnd while it sounds different from anything Van Etten has ever done, it also never sounds like anyone but her: Her big, sweeping choruses and singer-songwritery melodies adapt surprisingly well to their new context, with heavy, synthetic basslines and sparkling electronic embellishments accenting her echo-laden, multi-tracked vocals. Vincent, the more conventional singing of Olsen, the streamlining of unusual sounds with Suuns - without making Van Etten sound like any of them. Here, he incorporates some elements from albums he did with those artists - the idiosyncratic songwriting of St. Vincent, the Decemberists, Angel Olsen, Suuns and many others. Van Etten had a perfect collaborator for this sonic shift: prolific producer John Congleton, who has brought his brand of sonic precision to a wide variety of artists over the past few years - St. Doing it.”īoth the chaos and the focus of such Olympic-level multitasking are reflected in the album, which is a reinvention of the more conventional indie-rock singer-songwriter sound of her past albums, the most recent of which was 2014’s “Are We There.” Bored with the conventional rock-band format, she embraced electronics - but while such drastic shifts usually result in a fan-alienating, fish-out-of-water overreach (as evidenced by too many EDM- or hip-hop-influenced albums by too many rock or pop artists to number), instead Van Etten’s songs sound remarkably natural in their new setting. “I want to be a mom, a singer, an actress and go to school, and yeah, I have a stain on my shirt, oatmeal in my hair and I feel like a mess, but I’m here. As she’s said in recent interviews, many life changes went into veteran indie singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten’s fifth and latest - and dramatically different - album, “Remind Me Tomorrow.” She summarizes it thus in the album’s bio: “I wrote this record while going to school, pregnant, after taking ‘The OA’ audition,” she says, referring to the Netflix series in which she appears as a recurring character (somewhere in there, she also wrote the score for Katherine Dieckmann’s film “Strange Weather” and the closing title song for Tig Notaro’s show “Tig”). ![]()
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