Sharon Van Etten - Epic (2010) [24bit FLAC]

This past April, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon stood alone on stage at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati and played a song entitled "Love More". It was not a new Bon Iver tune but a cover culled from the songbook of Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten. The way Vernon wandered through the slow, often overwhelming beauty of that song, one walked away from it feeling as if he needed to hear more from and about Van Etten. It's a song that seizes you.

Van Etten came to Brooklyn by way of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and her parents' basement in New Jersey. Her first album, the self-released Because I Was In Love, was a tuneful set of simple, spare, acoustic-based travails. It wasn't remarkable, but at its heart was a voice that begged to be uncovered: an instrument as chilling as it was opaque, as wounded as the title of the record seemed to suggest. Epic, her first wide release, feels like the unveiling of her full talents. Classic songwriting with an ethereal delivery is central to her appeal, but it's her sense of confidence that really sells it, as the first lines of opener "A Crime" attest: "To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/ To admit I'm still in love with you after all this time/ I'd rather let you touch my arm until you die." On paper, those words might read a bit like coffee-shop fodder. But the cool grace with which Van Etten belts every line, and the dangerous force with which she strums every first count, make for an explosive sound that didn't seem possible from her earlier. She sounds as though she's arrived.

From there, Van Etten doesn't loosen her grip. As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting. "DsharpG" is one gorgeous, six-minute crescendo, Van Etten's voice haloed by Mellotron and kick drum. Lyrically, she explores relationships from a number of vantage points, and Epic was recorded so intimately that Van Etten sounds as close as she does gutted. It all comes together on the hopeful tones of "Love More", as her voice pirouettes and heaves over a story of learning to love again in spite of pain: "Tied to my bed, I was younger then, I had nothing to spend," she sighs. "But time on you, it made me love, it made me love, it made me love more." And so the titular mantra unfolds. It's one of the more emotionally draining songs I can remember hearing, and yet as soon as it's over, it turns out I want to listen again.