Here’s looking at you
…and you, and you: shape-shifting artist reflects in dramatic style. By Victoria Segal.
LISTENING TO All Mirrors in its current form, it seems incredible that a stripped-back variant is waiting in the wings. It’s the vestigial trace of Angel Olsen’s original plan to release two different versions of her fourth album simultaneously, one spare and solo, the other at full-band strength. While the alternative incarnation might still emerge, it’s initially hard to imagine how these songs could be presented unadorned and still exist. Unhook them from Jherek Bischoff’s string arrangements, decouple them from the billows of synth and mellotron, and it feels there could be nothing more solid left behind than trailing string, some tape residue, a few cryptic pencil markings. There’s always been a slight wobble and blur to Olsen’s music, especially at her most Roy Orbison, but All Mirrors at first seems as smoothly ungraspable as its Droste effect title suggests
The North Carolina-based singersongwriter has shifted direction before, from Will Oldham vocal foil and woodcut folk singer to tinsel-wigged jukebox queen – but here, it can feel like she’s shedding skins in a single song. Loss seeps through this record, but so does the impulse to recreate, reinvent, fill as much space as possible. “I could not come back the same,” Olsen sings on Lark, a Russian doll of a song that keeps pulling out new versions of itself: indie confessor, Take My Breath Away balladeer, John Cale explorer, Beatles mystic. On teary piano showstopper Chance, she bounces through different voices and registers on the line, “It’s hard to say forever, love/Forever’s just so far”, as if coming to the stage edge, removing the performer’s mask, and revealing another perfect mask. And another. “I’m walking through the scenes,” she sings, “I’m saying all the lines.”
There are tougher, clearer moments underlining her facility with a pop song: New Cassette Love could be The Human League slowed down for an art project about time and memory; What It Is echoes the glam static of Shut Up Kiss Me from 2016’s My Woman. Even at its most streamlined, though, this record refuses to be small or slight, preferring splashy drums, expanding strings, shoulder-first swagger. Impasse sounds like a grand deconstruction of a-ha’s Crying In The Rain; All Mirrors cocoons itself in gothy synthesizer clouds, Miss Havisham goes to Twin Peaks: “Losing beauty/At least at times it knew me.”
More loss, more change. If these songs sometimes feel diffuse and foggy, it could be because they are constantly rebuilding, slowly coalescing into a new reality on only-thelonely torch-song Endgame (“I’d rather be alone”) or defiant Tonight (“I like the life that I lead/Without you”). Behind the parachute silk and dry ice, the smoke and mirrors, stands a record in high emotional definition, its outline becoming sharper by the second.