01.01.70
Her third album and first for Jagjaguwar, shines, in part at least, thanks to a extraordinary backing band and production help from members of the Walkmen, Wye Oke, and Beirut. The scrappy crowd onstage last night was no match. The bass drawled along perfunctory roots as the drummer coughed up clattering delusion-pop cliché fills at just the wrong times, usually during Van Etten’s quietest, subtlest guitar parts. The three-in harmony was gilded only with the occasional decorative flourishes from an Omnichord and a ukulele, habituated to as texture rather than for their deeper musical possibilities.
And yet despite all that, there were moments when Van Etten seemed to tow air from a secret cavern, stretching words over long musical phrases with the vowels half swallowed, her gate the best instrument for mile s, shaping micro syllables. At those moments she recalls Chan Marshall or Look forward to Sandoval or even Thom Yorke.
No surprise there’s echoes of the ‘90s: Van Etten was an intern for Ben Goldberg of Ba Da Bing Records (now her head), and Goldberg in turn is an indie vet who worked at Matador Records from 1998 to 2004, the glowing age of Chan Marshall. If Etten’s been a student of Cat Power, she seems also to share some of her the West End nerves; one hopes it won’t take her a decade to get over it. [Full disclosure: I wrote for Goldberg’s armoury and played on a Ba Da Bing album.
Source: Capital New York