Angel Olsen - All Mirrors review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 0

(Jagjaguwar)
Literate, melodious songs twist into dissonance and darkness on Olsen’s new album. It’s a rewarding, unexpected listen

There are artists who seem to explode into the public consciousness at first sight, and there are artists whose career gradually builds to a tipping point. That’s where Angel Olsen would appear to find herself. She started life as the kind of artist it seemed easy to peg. Her sound was literate, folky, lo-fi and downcast. She had graduated from releasing EPs and cassettes to a deal with US indie Jagjaguwar, a label that’s released a lot of great music, but almost always of a certain stripe: “8.8 from Pitchfork” could be their in-house slogan. But Olsen’s third album, 2016’s My Woman, signified a noticeable shift: less introverted, more polished, poppy, and occasionally electronic, it also boasted a hitherto-unnoticed tendency to rock in a straightforward style. It didn’t just get 8.8 from Pitchfork, it broke the lower reaches of the US Top 50 and spawned a successful single in Shut Up Kiss Me, a song that you can imagine rousing a huge festival crowd. A bit more of that, ran the general consensus, and mainstream success was a given: an assumption bolstered by her guest appearance on Mark Ronson’s recent album Late Night Feelings.

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