This week’s SINGLE OF THE WEEK-er may seem quite familiar to regular CULTURED VULTURES, particularly readers of our music feature PULSE; Van Etten appeared in our GREEN MAN SPECIAL after her amazing performance there off the back of her latest album, Are We There – released in May of this year.
If you didn’t catch that edition of Pulse, Sharon Van Etten is a New York based, singer-songwriter, Are We There her fourth studio album, and ‘Your Love Is Killing Me’ the latest single from it. The album has been received rather spectacularly, with justifiable critical acclaim to boot. It’s an album of impassioned and powerfully emotive songs not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves and show you their flaws.
‘Your Love Is Killing Me’ is a perfect example of that, as it steadily rises on its own sense of the dramatic and impacting, musically it is grandiose; steadily rising upon sparse marching rhythms, church organs, and Van Etten’s stunning vocals, slowly revealing more layers bringing the song a wider cinematic scope.
Though the instrumentation and the arrangement’s rises and falls are brilliant, it is Van Etten’s vocal performance that is the star of the show, evocatively pleading through the chorus ‘break my legs so I won’t walk to you/cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you/burn my skin so I can’t feel you/stab my eyes so I can’t see you/you like it when I let you walk over me/you tell me you like it/your love is killing me’.
The video, directed by Sean Durkin, is equally powerful in its conveyance of a defiantly broken spirit, but with subtlety, through minimal shots and cuts, and a striking and emotional performance from actress Carla Juri, of Wetlands. Check it out below.
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