Live Review: Sharon Van Etten at Vicar Street

In dark crushed velvet, hair arranged sharply around her expressive face, Sharon Van Etten resembled something from a David Lynch fever-dream.

She was returning to Vicar Street after four years and a lifetime of change. In the interim, the New Jersey singer has become a parent, embarked on a parallel career in acting (in Netflix bonkers-fest The OA, alongside a turning singing on Twin Peaks: The Return) and even taken a stab at stand-up comedy.

All of that bliss, exhaustion and upheaval she has poured into her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow – a portrait of the artist at a crossroads that segues from optimism to melancholy, and is shot through with an air of wonder about life and the paths it can lead you down.

That same sense of sprawling psychodrama informs her new tour, for which she has largely forsaken her guitar and the alt-country cadences of her early career. In their place she brought a darkly glittering catharsis on ‘Seventeen’, where the 30-something looks back, wistfully and without judgement, on the bright eyed young person she used to be.

Ahead of Mother’s Day, there was also a tumultuous rumination on parenthood via a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys On Mopeds’, a psychodrama about every mother or father’s fears for their children as they go out into the world.

The heartstrings were tugged further as Van Etten revealed that her two year old was back at home in New York (it went without saying that she misses her child dearly).

That she was making such a huge sacrifice in order to be here with her fans put the capstone on a performance by turns bleak and ferocious – but always profoundly moving.