When you’re the best thing to come out of New Jersey since Bon Jovi, you carry a decent amount of weight on your shoulders. Also when names like Pitchfork and NPR give you accolades of praise, you carry a lot of weight onto your next releases. But you know you hold a lot of weight when you get members from The National, Beirut, and The Walkmen (amongst others) to provide the backing for your newest single. Also, if you fit all that, you’re none other than Sharon Van Etten.
And that new single would be called “Serpents.” And that song sounds like something straight off of Daria Morgendorffer’s Walkman. While musically it’s nothing groundbreaking, and could be compared to many of the songs on the “Nineties buzz ballads” commercials that were the soundtrack to my Nickelodeon childhood, her voice and poeticism really refresh and satisfy in a way that most modern female vocalists don’t.
Regardless if you come from New Jersey or not (I’m refraining from a New Jersey Joke here (that was kind of a New Jersey Joke in itself)) you will hear it elsewhere. Tramp, which is slated for a February 2012 release, is being supported by a large winter tour with The National, Shearwater, and The War on Drugs. Her live shows are definitely worthwhile to see which is good, because fans like hers deserve an album as good as this poses to be, and an album of that caliber deserves an equally good live act to give it its proper dues.