The title of this review comes from the first line of "What It Is", one of the more straightforward songs on the new album from Angel Olsen. All Mirrors, out on Friday via Jagjaguwar, is a lush record. It's also a rather raw one. And if the confessional lyrics are draped in ornate string arrangements, the effect is an operatic one and not something powerful being smothered. Originally intending to record an album full of personal songs in sparse settings, Olsen, working with producer John Congleton, arranger Jherek Bischoff, multi-instrumentalist/arranger/pre-producer Ben Babbitt, and a 14-piece orchestra, went in another direction entirely. The overall impact here is like hearing Kate Bush remake Dusty in Memphis. Angel Olsen so successfully bridges genres with this one, that a listener is left speechless, and fumbling for descriptive adjectives. How about great? As in, this is a great album.
All Mirrors as a release finds the singer bouncing easily from the Jeff Lynne-influenced "Spring" to the bright Eighties-style pop of the title cut, surely a contender for single of the year. The sleek surfaces here hide darkness in the lyrics: "Losing beauty. At least at times it knew me." The poignancy of those words is augmented by keyboard-figures that are as graceful as anything from the heyday of New Order, a band whose tunes influenced those of Olsen's past collaborators, The Cairo Gang (Emmett Kelly). "New Love Cassette" is similar to things that Weyes Blood attempted on her fine album earlier this year. But what makes this different is that Olsen embraces the material in such a way that it feels like we're hearing something entirely new. I mean, there are plenty of singers singing heart-felt lyrics, but rarely do the singers elevate the arrangement and setting of the music to an equal level of importance with the lyrics. That idea, that methodology, is what makes so much of All Mirrors so stunning.
And, yes, "Lark", the epic opener, is absolutely breathtaking. The sort of thing that most artists would build up to over the course of an LP, Angel Olsen instead uses it to set the swooning mood here on All Mirrors. The cut, lush and positively baroque in one moment, and discordant and emotive the next, demands your attention in a way that few other pieces possibly could in 2019. Deliriously retro and frighteningly modern, the song floored me. "Impasse" later on the record uses a similar sound to achieve another end, while "Tonight" is elegiac and full of a quiet stateliness that's rare. To the credit of Angel and the players she's assembled here on All Mirrors, every cut explores some variance in the original idea of pairing those confessional words with these kinds of sounds. Even the future pop of "Summer" feels as successful as, say, the wildly dissimilar and Legrand-like "Chance", the closer to All Mirrors. I remain seriously impressed by just how expertly considered a record this is, especially when the lyrics and mood are so richly emotive.
All Mirrors is out on Friday via Jagjaguwar.
More details on Angel Olsen via the official website, or via her official Facebook page.
[Photo: Cameron McCool]