FILTER ALBUMS

Grief and light combine to potent effect on singer-songwriter’s sixth album.

By Victoria Segal. Illustration by Peter Strain.

Angel Olsen ★★★★

Big Time

JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP

U NCERTAINTY AND turmoil can trigger two standard creative responses: an attempt to replicate those emotional shatter patterns and seismic shocks, turning all the disturbance and disorientation into brutal art, or else a move towards the familiar and comforting, something with deep roots, stable sides, solid foundations. Big Time, Angel Olsen’s sixth album, emerges from a period of axisshifting change. Last April, she came out to the world via Instagram, captioning a picture of her partner, Beau Thibodeaux, with “My beau, I’m gay”. While she was ready to celebrate her identity, however, she lost both her parents in cruelly quick succession. Three weeks after her mother’s death, the North Carolina-based Olsen was in her co-producer Jonathan Wilson’s Los Angeles studio recording Big Time. “I was a little afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Olsen tells MOJO, “but right away I realised it was the best thing for me to do because I didn’t want to be at home just staring at the wall.”

There has always been a great deal of movement in Angel Olsen’s music – her 2017 compilation was called Phases with good reason. “I was safe when I was in the womb,” she sang on 2012’s woodcut debut Half Way Home, but since then, her songs have suggested an ongoing struggle to fix steady coordinates. The video for All The Good Times, the first song released from Big Time, unfolds in tumbling f lashbacks – including one where she wears the distinctive silver wig from the video for 2016’s Shut Up Kiss Me. At one point, she seems to be trying to run down a version of herself in her car.

The message – like that of the splendidly poised break-up song – seems clear: this is a new beginning. Later, on the fragile This Is How It Works, she sings, “I am moving everything around/I won’t get attached to the way that it was”, a forced emotional spring clean, somebody grabbing the corners of her life and shaking them out to see where everything lands.

BACK STORY: CALL MY AGENT

● “The reason why I wanted to call it Big Time was because I felt like after all that happened, I was never the same,” explains Olsen. “I like when a title can mean a lot of different things. I’m trying to write a script right now and I’m like, ‘What do we call it?’” The script, she says, is “exercise for myself. But it’s so hard to take yourself seriously doing something you’ve never done before. Like, who do I think I am? I like music but it’s not everything for me. As I’m getting older there are other things I’d like to do. Even if I fail at them, I’d like to try.”

“Big Time has a of masks peeling away, veils dropped.”

While most of the songs were written before her bereavement and as a result of the break-up of her previous relationship, Olsen acknowledges that their performance was inevitably inf luenced by her loss. Low on the bandwidth needed to rehearse with her band, they remained fresh in the studio, resulting in a different kind of immediacy. With its enveloping synth-pop, 2019’s All

Mirrors felt like a strange chrysalis, Olsen moving obscurely within its opaque walls, reconfiguring cells, upgrading her form. Her next two releases were curiosities:

Aisles, an EP of ’80s songs (including Men Without Hats’ Safety Dance) and the compelling Whole New Mess, songs from All Mirrors in their beautifully stark original form. Big Time doesn’t feel like a definitive sense transformation – it’s still tender and unfurled in places – but it does have a new clarity, a sense of masks peeling away, veils dropped. That directness largely springs from its well-deep country inf luences – not the parched Americana of 2010 EP Strange Cacti and 2014’s Burn Your Fire For No

Witness, but the meltwater country of Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette, Olsen’s elusive voice at its most limpid. While Jherek Bischoff’s string arrangements were important to All Mirrors, here the instrumentation is used not to smoke-screen and dramatise, but to clear space, horns, organ and pedal steel opening up the air around her, the synths replaced by blood-warm keyboards and piano. “I need to be myself/I won’t live another lie,” she sings on the defiant Right Now, while All The Good Times begins, “I can’t say that I’m sorry when I don’t feel so wrong any more” – her phrasing impeccable, her voice catching the light like a stray rhinestone.

It’s followed immediately by the title track, a song that Olsen – cautiously, she wryly explains – co-wrote with her partner. The aim was to write a “gay country love song” about their meeting – with its coffee, kisses and declarations of love, it’s just that, its gingham wholesomeness coming with a hard-fought undertow. For once, it’s not complicated. At the other end of the spectrum, however, is This Is How Is Works, the song dealing with the death of Olsen’s mother. “I’ve never been too sad/So sad that I couldn’t share,” she sings with a tight exhausted smile as the pedal steel trickles around her. Unlike Big Time’s fresh dawn, it feels like somebody who has been up all night, clinging to the edges the country structure provides.

Yet for all its immediacy, Big Time isn’t without mystery. There are phantoms and visions, even if they come bathed in the record’s amber half-light rather than the blue chill of earlier records. Dream Thing references her early work with Will Oldham (“I was searching my mind for the words to that Black Captain song”), wrestling with the idea that something so valuable to you could mean so little to somebody else. The past is always there, tugging at the hem of her subconscious: the etherised piano of P.J. Harvey’s White Chalk seeps around Ghost On, while Go Home sees Olsen declaring, “I am the ghost now/Living those old scenes.” It’s a moment of sudden furious yearning for something lost, Bridge Over Troubled Water softness roughed up by Olsen’s sudden Patti Smith yowl.

Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances of its making, there’s a vulnerability to Big Time. The crazed-glass fragility of All The Flowers fights to exist in the moment; Through The Fires, a luscious ballad that sounds like South Pacific scored by Weyes Blood, is further testament to survival, Olsen’s voice spinning away like a weather balloon: “Higher higher lighter lighter”. Chasing The Sun’s soundstage glow, meanwhile, sees Olsen lost in love’s delirious dissolution of the self. One (ironic) way to read the title of Big Time is that Olsen has ‘arrived’ – yet as she closes this record by driving into the horizon, it’s clear she still hasn’t reached any final destination. “I could not come back the same,” Olsen sang on Lark, the opening track of All Mirrors, and, once again, she hasn’t.

Big Time is a country staging post, a space for clarity and comfort in difficult times, but it is also the sound of somebody moving everything around, finding a new arrangement, a different way to push forward.

ANGEL SPEAKS!

OF SOUND AND “BITTER DUDES”. LSEN ON DENIM OUTFITS, WALLS

Horsegirl

★★★★

Versions Of Modern Performance

MATADOR. CD/DL/LP

Teen Chicago trio deliver impeccable debut of artful clatter and bruised melody.

Their no waveinfluenced immediacy and noise-driven invention push Horsegirl’s offbeat post-punk firmly ahead of the pack. Teenaged scions of Chicago’s teeming DIY all-ages scene, the trio’s debut album is rich in textural sophistication, carving hooks from fidgety harmonics and swooning whammy-bar abuse. But the staccato choruses and Sonic Youth-ish refrains of the unshakeable Option 8 and surging, single-chord loveliness Worlds Of Pots And Pans prove they’re no slouches when it comes to a tune, either. Their reference points are impeccable, echoing the nofucks-given ennui of late-period Chastity Belt and the murky effortlessness of Guided By Voices, but the mystery and charm that characterise this remarkable debut are all their own. “Fall into my wormhole,” Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein intone hypnotically on the majestic Homage To Birdnoculars. And fall you will, without any need of rescue.

Stevie Chick

Drive-By Truckers

★★★★

Welcome To Club XIII

ATO. CD/DL/LP

Southern rock’s premier survivors turn their dramatic past into poignant anthems.

Live long enough, and you’ll have some proper stories to tell – that’s a goal, at least. Arguably America’s most dependably great rock band for the last quarter-century, Drive-By Truckers have never been short on memorable tales, with portraits rendered from assorted carousers of the American South. But after a string of timely political missives, the Truckers turn inward and backward here, transforming times they almost died, should have died, or perhaps wished they would’ve died into nine crackling odes to survival. With his trademark gothic drawl, Patterson Hood limns close highway calls with perspicacity, then mourns the compatriots he’s lost to foibles and vices alike. Perennially underrated Mike Cooley, meanwhile, hands in some of his sharpest-ever writing on Every Single Storied Flameout, like R.E.M. plus brawn, a definitive take on the (glorious) ways rock leads kids astray. Long may these Truckers roll.