We've Been Going About This All Wrong (Deluxe Edition)＜Custard Vinyl＞

The album title Weve Been Going About This All Wrong channels all of the uncertainty floating in the air in 2022, an era distinguished by a pandemic and political tumult. During this period, Sharon Van Etten moved across the country, got married, and started raising a family in an unfamiliar city during the pandemic lockdown. Van Etten is hardly the only person to experience personal upheaval as the world roiled, but the strength of Weve Been Going About This All Wrong is how her specific stories have a wider resonance. Some of that power lies in her evocative lyrical sketches, where images of yearning, parenthood, isolation, and love create the impression of difficult but necessary emotional growth; its the shedding of the skin in preparation for a new stage of life. Appropriately, Van Etten creates a vivid, intense soundscape for this evolution, using the retro-new wave flourishes of 2019s Remind Me Tomorrow as a foundation for a dynamic, dramatic interior epic. Van Etten played nearly every instrument on Weve Been Going About This All Wrong on her own in her home studio, and the album, appropriately, has a bit of an insular feel, as if it depicts the tension within her own psyche. This doesnt mean the record is delivered on a miniature scale. Although there are moments, such as "Darkish," where shes accompanying herself with no more than an acoustic guitar, there are also steely rhythms, washes of synths, and squalls of distorted guitar, all elements that give Weve Been Going About This All Wrong painterly details along with a sense of momentum. Van Etten isnt wallowing in melancholy, shes accepting the sadness along with the joy, using both emotions to push into a new stage of life. That sense of optimism, no matter how muted it may sometimes be, gives Weve Been Going About This All Wrong an air of unguarded hope. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

敏腕プロデューサーのジョン・コングルトンが手掛けた前作から3年ぶりのニュー・アルバムはセルフ・プロデュース。重厚なサウンドだった前作の流れを汲みつつも、ピアノと生ギターの弾き語りが目立つ極めてシンプルな内容だ。特に心の奥底から絞り出したような彼女の歌声が感動的で、キャリア史上もっとも内省的な作品と言っていい。ストリングス・アレンジの天才、オーウェン・パレットも参加。
bounce (C)赤瀧洋二