Angel Olsen – My woman (Jagjaguwar)



This is the Angel Olsen record I was waiting for.

There’s a lovely garage rock feel to the guitars, a setting that works very well with her voice.

It’s a wonderful voice of course. It can be tender, it can be harsh, soft, berating, pleading, encouraging. Soulful needless to say, capable of turning the direction of a line with some crucial inflection or a change of gear. Usually simmering with intent and always laden with emotion.

This guitar vocal combination is best showcased in the early sequence of ‘Never be mine’, ‘Shut up kiss me’ and ‘Give it up’, a killer run of love, loss and fuzzy guitars. (She also does a marvellous thing midway through ‘Shut up kiss me’ which involves a bank of Angel voices racking up the tension on one repeated note in glorious harmony.)

It must be said that she tries on other clothes over the course of the album (‘Those were the days’ is an especially gorgeous cosmic soul turn), and there’s no doubt she can turn her hand to many things, but for me those garage rock clothes fit her best of all.



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