Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory @ Barrowlands, Glasgow, 12 Mar
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory finish their UK tour at one of Glasgow’s oldest, most honoured music venues. The often dark, always dreamy liaise between act and audience could not make a more intimate match
Tonight's opener Nabihah Iqbal is keen to court the Glasgow crowd. The London singer-songwriter explains her album Dreamer was recorded in the Scottish countryside at Cove Park, and sings its title track brightly enough to take the ethereal hit right up to the rafters. Zone 1 to 6000 follows, then Sunflower; instrumentalist Aldous RH accompanies on guitar and sax, while Iqbal often performs a high-tempo spoken word. Her tributes to the birthplace of her album include a tartan beret, and shouting out local businesses like Outlier Coffee just down the Gallowgate. A cover of The Cure’s A Forest and her single This World Couldn’t See Us gathers an elated audience under the starry ceiling of the venue.
Smoke and purple lights prelude tonight's headliners. Before a triptych of splattered canvases, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory are summoned to the stage. Thrumming synth notes gather like thunderclouds, and the leading lady reaches out with dangling black sleeves, singing 'Who wants to live forever?' When the opening track of the band’s eponymous album reaches heavy drums and screeching synths, strobe lights rain down. Van Etten’s operatic high notes are delicate as crystal, but still pierce through the more metallic elements of these songs. Her hand waves by her side, sometimes like a conductor keeping time, or a witch casting a spell.
Teeny Lieberson operates the electronics like alchemy, dressed in a funerary suit with thigh-high leather boots. The incantation of notes that starts Afterlife are played, met with cheers of recognition. Van Etten gets her hands on a guitar for the irresistible Idiot Box and thanks Iqbal for joining their “travelling freakshow.”
Image: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory by Marilena Vlachopoulou
Not quite the dark high priestess she appears, Van Etten treats the crowd with an open heart. She reminisces about her last time at the Barrowlands, when her son was skateboarding around the springboard dancefloor during sound check. Before she arrived here today, she sat with a nurse-in-training who tended to a medical emergency outside the station. “What a year,” she says early on, in her chirpy candour, “What a couple of years. Fucking hell.”
Throughout the night, the singer introduces her once-backing band as her chosen family, thanks her friend Maxim Ludwig for creating the backdrop paintings that moved her so much, and memorialises an artist whom she deeply adored – David Lynch – before playing Tarifa, which she performed at the Roadhouse Bar on Twin Peaks: The Return.
The mixture of old and new songs excels in the difficult job of moving a middle-of-the-week crowd. Under slower, stormier selections like Southern Life (What It Must Be Like) the audience are entranced; for hits like Every Time the Sun Comes Up they're clapping, helping build the rhythm, joining the chosen family.
The playful Van Etten dances with her bandmates, a different dimension of the author whose apocalyptic notions we hear in Anything; 'Up the whole night, undefined / Can't stop thinking 'bout peace and war / Up the whole night, right before / The sun takes everything'. Well aware of the darkness in the world, Van Etten explains that’s why “we find music that makes us feel shit.” Their encore is the ghostly lullaby Fading Beauty, leaving the night nurtured with the values Van Etten shared; being moved by art, humanity, and giving a fuck.