Angel Olsen: All Mirrors review – shapeshifting songs to impress and unnerve

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.

Or perhaps not. Three years on, the opening of Olsen’s follow-up suggests that the unexpected shift of My Woman told you more about Olsen’s interest in unexpected shifts than her desire to be a mainstream star. On paper, Lark doesn’t seem like anything particularly out of the ordinary: it’s a heavily orchestrated ballad, on which strings are bolstered by thundering, Phil Spector-ish drums, and we’ve all heard a lot of those over the years. But the arrangement of Lark doesn’t cleave to the standard epic alt-rock ballad mode: it isn’t trying to mimic the high drama of Scott Walker’s late 60s albums, nor the romantic lushness of the Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds, nor the cinematic swoon of Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, nor any of the other things that alt-rock artists tend to do when they decide to favour the world with an epic ballad. Instead, the strings drone and churn and, occasionally, screech, as if signifying a moment of alarm on the soundtrack of an old thriller. The song itself is beautiful, but the arrangement seems constantly on the verge of dissonance, which lends the track tension and edge. What should on the face of it feel familiar feels anything but.

That seems to be as close as All Mirrors gets to a USP: it’s an album that keeps taking ostensibly recognisable musical forms and twisting them out of shape into something challenging and intriguing. The title track deals in a certain kind of alt-rock’s current favourite mode – 80s-influenced synths drifting dreamily along – and shifts its mood completely. Olsen starts out singing in the standard blank-eyed style that goes with dreamy 80s synths, but gradually ratchets up the intensity until it feels discomfiting. Then another off-kilter string arrangement crashes in: the effect isn’t lush so much as oppressive, deliberately crowded with sound.

Spring starts life with a piano modulating in Hey Jude style, but quickly turns odd. Olsen’s vocal is dry and deliberately high in the mix: for all the prettiness of the melody she’s singing, the effect is weirdly claustrophobic, a sensation increased by a burst of queasily out-of-tune synthesised bells. You would describe Endgame as atmospheric and ambient, were it not for the fact that those adjectives suggest something soothing and warm, and the atmosphere Endgame conjures up is sickly and distended, occasionally lapsing into eerie silence. Olsen’s voice suddenly loses its swathe of reverb, sounding in the process as if she’s singing in your ear. A solitary beam of warm light in an otherwise dark and disturbing album comes with the closer Chance, a straightforwardly beautiful, if vocally wracked, ballad that looks to 50s doo wop for inspiration.

The lyrics suggest that a break-up is at the heart of All Mirrors’ stylistic shifts: the first words you hear on the album are “to forget you is too hard”; the relatively upbeat Chance grasps gingerly at the prospect of reconciliation or new love. What’s striking about what happens in between is how skilful it is at upending the listener’s preconceptions, never turning out quite as you assume it will. It’s not easy listening, despite the preponderance of melodies, something that Olsen’s plan to release an entirely acoustic version in the future seems to acknowledge: its intensity is always set so high, it automatically makes demands of the listener. But it is rewarding: the sound of Angel Olsen skilfully mapping out an unanticipated new territory for herself, further out on the left-field. Nothing on All Mirrors ends up quite where you expect, including the artist who made it.

This week Alexis listened to

Rev Harvey Gates: It’s Hard to Live in This Old World
From DJ Greg Belson’s fantastic compilation The Time for Peace Is Now: plaintive, sparse and moving super-obscure gospel, its message still wearily relevant.