The Scene

Angel Olsen has worn a few different guises in her short time on the scene but the silvery glam-wig she chucks on in her trailer vid for the song Intern was a new one. Because first she was a sparse folky, signing paeans to the universe on Half Way Home. Then she went electric and found a beat on ‘Burn Your Fire For No Witness’. I guess the silverlocks were only a natural progression.

The differences between those first two albums were fairly large. The songs got tighter, the band expanded and all that. The result was what many called a ‘breakthrough album’ though to be honest I love both of those records and if anything HWH has the edge over BYFFNW if only because of the track Tiniest Seed which is a proper stunner. Having said that, Burn Your Fire still cracked the Wildcard’s Top Ten for 2014 list.

With My Woman, rather than keep moving in the same direction she’s drawing from both of those albums. The modern electronic elements have grown but at the same time, she’s writing tunes that flow and stretch out like she did on HWH. Sister and Woman both reach well over seven and a half minutes in length, though they rarely feel that long. Gleefully, she’s plucked the best parts of each and the result is an album that arguably stands above either of them – no mean feat.

The Songs

1. Intern – Slow synths and unhurried vocals, a scene setting opener.
2. Never Be Mine – Pining for the unattainable along a pleasantly pre-Beatles pop tune.
3. Shut Up Kiss Me – Letting loose in the main single. Up-beat and determined, having plenty of fun at the same time. Absolutely storming chorus.
4. Give It Up – The guitar almost sounds like Kurt Cobain mighta played it. Punchy, enjoyable song too.
5. Not Gonna Kill You – Let the light shine in, champ. It ain’t gonna kill ya to be positive. Cut from the same cloth as Give It Up but acoustic guitars dominate instead. Badass freakout at the end.
6. Heat Shaped Face – Slow it down and let the poetry slide on over a sultry musical bed punctuated with some sharp stabs of the git-fiddle. Heartache ends and begins again.
7. Sister – One of the two long ones. Imagined siblings and keen refrains flitter across one of the highlights of the whole collection. The first half yearns where the second half ascends.
8. Those Were The Days – Then we have this nostalgic ditty, which you could almost call smooth jazz with the whispered vocals and scattered instrumental flourishes. The chorus lays anchor.
9. Woman – The other long one. There’s that synth again. Mmm and the bassline gets it done. By the time you hit the blast off point her voice is long since soaring among the stars although the song never gets too carried away.
10. Pops – And that’ll be a piano. Vocals slightly distorted. Going straight for the heart from beneath the shadow cast by the affair’s end. You can go on home, you got what you need.

The Vibe

Angel Olsen sings about the usual stuff but with an unusual perspective. It’s heartbreak and relationships and loneliness and love only with an ethereal feel to it all. There’s also a sense of humour too that’s easy to lose in it all but is there all the same. On her last album there was a song called High Five that found an ironic laugh in shared isolation with the line: “Are you lonely too? High Five, so am I”. This time that smirkiness is used to great effect on Shut Up Kiss Me where she plays this lovelorn woman on the fringes:

“Stop pretending I'm not there

When it's clear I'm not going anywhere

If I'm out of sight then take another look around

I'm still out there hoping to be found”

Dunno if she’s meant to be the overlooked friend there or the partner trying to rekindle the flames, either way it’s a banger.

And it’s important to remember the bubbly side to these tunes because, yes, the darkness is in there too. Not quite like Nick Cave’s new one (Jeeeezus…) but this is hardly bubblegum. There are songs that trudge their way through a synthy fog and others that strut along with grungey, guitar-driven intent. Olsen’s voice is where it all begins and ends. Her voice is this otherworldly thing, it’s what lifted Half Way Home above the myriad of folk pretenders and into something unique and it’s what gave Burn Your Fire the transcendence that it strove for. I dunno how to describe it, it’s shaky and its spectacular.

Of course, having a shaky voice and singing deep philosophy about love, self, darkness and light while also lacking a Y chromosome means that you have to deal with that clichéd ‘difficult woman’ tag and its many semantic incarnations.

“I dare you to understand what makes me a woman” – Woman.

The Music

The opening track, Intern, sets you up for a synthpop opus but then the record never quite gets back to that point. Never Be Mine begins straight away with Angel’s voice in what could almost be classed as a bit of Ronettes kind of 60s jangle pop, only swap the harmonies for a single voice heavy on reverb. Plus slowed down some.

There’s definitely a 50s-60s feel to a few of these songs and that only shows a focus and maturity of songwriting that compliments her more drawn out ruminations better than what she’s done in the past. My Woman flows from tune to tune in a way that makes them hard to distinguish on first listen, which is a good thing as far as the whole ‘cohesion’ idea goes. As good as so many of the songs were on her previous record, that one shifts in focus as the tracklist progresses. Half Way Home, meanwhile, only had the one focus. All three are solid albums, a consistency that you can only really achieve through inconsistency, in a way. Like, if this were the third campfire folky in a row then you can bet the idea would have lost steam without a little variation.

Part of the credit has to go to producer Justin Raisen, who has also worked with modern chanteuses such as Charlie XCX and Sky Fereira (your turn next, Sky – when’s that next album coming?). At different times you hear the influences of all multitude of sounds yet the album’s not easily categorised. I s’pose it falls under the folk rock banner, maybe the indie banner. The fact that you can’t tag it, and that it still feels like a singular listen (although the punchier tracks are all at the start and the elongated ones at the back end), is a triumph all of its own. These days you drop a major album and within days there are grades and scores out of ten and all that. It can take years to make an album and within hours it’s already being classified. A bit dumb, really. And something Olsen seems determined to rally against. (Hence why on the Nichey Niche we prefer ideas and revelations to conclusions and judgements).

Again, the uniting factor is that haunting voice.

After the jumpier songs in the first half, the album shifts further into the folk realms (I love that word ‘folk’ – especially in a musical sense). Heart Shaped Face has a much more languid flow where Olsen really draws on her words. Vocals are always an instrument but Olsen really treats hers like one. Sister is a rung higher on the tempo ladder but is every bit as aching as she finds some kind of salvation in the form of a dreamed-up sister – kinda poignant when you consider Olsen was adopted at age 3. Once the drum kicks in and the refrain begins, it isn’t 100 miles from some of the War on Drugs’ more atmospheric tunes – right down to the slashing guitar solo. Woman would be a standout on the new Chromatics album (if it ever arrives). Pops closes it in a lo-fi dream state.

Revelations

“There is nothing wrong under the sun”

“Heaven hits me when I see your face”

“Shutupkissmeholdmetightstopyourcryingitsalright”

“‘Til I am nothing else but the feeling/Becoming true/Cant help feeling the way that I do/Become a prophet/Become a fool”

“Was it me you were thinking of?/All the time when you thought of me/Or was it your mother?/Or was it your shelter?/Or was it another with a heart shaped face.”

“All my life I thought I'd change”

“I’ve been thinking how your smile seems to last forever”

“I’ll be the thing that lives in the dream when it’s gone”

Finale

To be honest, this is probably the record that people wanted Burn Your Fire to be and while the best songs on each can go hand in hand, My Woman is probably a bit stronger overall. Luckily each has their own charms so there’s no need to compare. Having said that, this is what Angel herself had to say speaking to NPR:

"If I were to critically compare this record and the last one," Olsen says, "I would say the last record is like when you first pick up Dostoyevsky or Kafka and you're talking with all your friends and you're like, 'I understand things now and I'm going to tell people what I understand and it's going to be important.' And then this record is more like, 'I'm going to take a little bit of those things, but I also want to have fun, because fun is important to me.' "

You can get that from the album. This isn’t her trying to make the grand statement record, trying to cover all bases. This is her settling into something more natural and free and pure and the result is well worth spending a bit of time with.