EMOTIONAL HEALING

Sharon Van Etten The Attachment Theory’s record could be an album of the year contender, says Helen Brown, while Olly Alexander and Inhaler return with very mixed results

- Helen Brown

Imagine a Rubik's Cube made of undiluted jelly. If you can go a step further and picture someone repeatedly manipulating those rubbery cubes through a complex series of puzzled sequences, then you’ll have a good sense of how ingeniously gelatinous the bass lines of Sharon Van Etten’s seventh album sound. Slipsquelching out from beneath the intuitive fingertips of Devra Hoff, they form a terrific backdrop for the way Van Etten twistturns her way through the emotional problems addressed on the self-titled Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory.

This is the first time the New Jersey-born Van Etten has shared the credit with her band – making that choice with double emphasis in both the title and artists’ names. Long-term fans of her frequently introspective songwriting won’t be surprised to learn that she has always written alone... until now. She began her career after recovering from a long-term abusive relationship with a fellow musician, who she claims would mock and belittle her musical ideas and aspirations. No wonder she felt safer unpicking and unpacking her thoughts in private. But now she’s happily resettled in LA with a partner and eight-year-old son, seemingly loosened up enough to try writing songs during jam sessions.

Sensitively produced by Marta Salogni, the result is both seductive and hypnotic – it’s as though Van Etten has taken a creative stage dive and found herself held aloft by supportive bandmates, who prove more than capable of taking the weight of her ideas while offering lovely, post-punk inflected directional drifts of their own.