Often when it concerns love, it’s about how tentative it feels: “Turning the wheel on my street/My heart still skips a beat,” she sings on “ Jupiter 4” (named for the synthesizer behind much of the album), a whirring dirge filled with ghostly cries and thunderclaps. It is the peak of Van Etten’s songwriting, her most atmospheric and emotionally piercing album to date. The restraint is more of a revelation than another addition to the grim details that litter her catalog, explaining everything about Van Etten’s hard-won control over her life.Īnd yet, Remind Me Tomorrow is not unyielding. Crucially, we never find out what she tells him. The exchange forms the start of a relationship: held hands, knocked knees, total candor. “It’s cathartic to play, and people like it,” she told The Ringer of one old song, “but I also want to challenge people on why they like it, and how it makes me feel.” Remind Me Tomorrow starts with a disclosure, “I Told You Everything.” “You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died,’” she sings, repeating the line throughout the song and peeling back layer by layer of shock factor until only sad starkness remains. An abusive relationship she experienced in her early 20s has defined much of her songwriting to date, so much so that it started making her feel uncomfortable. More than ever, it’s these uneasy textures that do Van Etten’s storytelling for her. The aggressive sound meets its match in her cresting, torrid sense of melody. Corroded synths flicker like a helicopter rotor, cutting her characteristic grace with a sense of menace the production and Van Etten herself often sound as though they’re asphyxiating. Remind Me Tomorrow is as much a faithful reimagining of her muscular songwriting as last year’s Double Negative was of Low’s haunted spirituals, right down to the shared apocalyptic atmosphere. That is, thankfully, not the case here nor is it that Van Etten, tired of the guitar, just threw a few synths at the wall. It’s her first album made with John Congleton, a producer many acts have turned to in recent years under the guise of wanting to mimic his art-pop work with St.
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