Live Review: Sharon Van Etten, BATTS

BATTS strums and sighs her way through songs about listening to Bon Iver and eating cheese. Her originals like Folding Chairs and For Now float pleasantly by, but the highlight is a gentle cover of Gillian Welch’s Everything Is Free, a song from the early days of file-sharing which turned out to be astonishingly prescient. 

Reformed folkie Sharon Van Etten sets the tone for her set with Jupiter 4, a dingy ballad named after a 1970s synthesiser. In a red velvet pantsuit, she saunters around the stage, from guitar to keyboards to windchimes, at one point poring over an effects pedal on the ground. 

New songs like No One’s Easy To Love and Malibu have an austere edge that wasn’t present in her music before. These new songs contain all of the anxiety, exhilaration and fierce love of a new mother interrogating herself and the world with a fresh vigilance.

Van Etten seems to occupy the stage with a newfound confidence, having mostly unburdened herself of the guitar. She appears more comfortable taking up physical and sonic space, pausing to allow the lovely coda of Tarifa to breathe, and letting a couple of other songs stretch into cacophonous conclusions.

Van Etten is masterful at creating moments: a sparse cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s Black Boys On Mopeds, her quavering voice accompanied only by a few simple piano chords;  the heart-rending short story contained in the subtext of I Told You Everything; the guttural cries of Seventeen, delivered directly to the face of some unsuspecting young person in the front row. Meanwhile, this sludgy, muscular version of Hands is probably the closest she’ll ever come to going metal. 

Beneath these synthetic textures and more raucous arrangements, tonight’s setlist is a testament to the striking consistency of her songcraft. As she’s developed and dabbled in different sounds, Van Etten has created a back catalogue that can stand beside that of any singer-songwriter of the past decade. 

Van Etten imbues the inevitable but still stunning closer Love More with weariness and solemnity and defiance and hope. Her music inspires the kind of devotion that manifests in handwritten notes and wrapped gifts pushed into her hands as she leaves the stage. Murky, incongruous emotions have always lurked in Van Etten’s music. It’s fascinating to watch her open herself up to embrace them all.