- On her fourth album, her third signed to Jagjaguwar, American rock auteur Angel Olsen delivers her grandest work yet. All Mirrors is a chilling and captivating take on orchestral rock. Here Angel Olsen has reinvented herself, with no similarities to any of her former works. The only indication of this being a project by her at all is that raw howl of a voice, one that she unleashed previously in Burn Your Fire For No Witness's High Five and MY WOMAN’s Shut Up Kiss Me.
You can hear this explosive fury in standout single Lark: a track which I felt could not be topped by anything that would follow. With a gradual build, impeccable climax and transcendent sense of vertigo, it initially sounded like one of the best songs that she had ever released. To my astonishment, All Mirrors is an album filled with Larks.
All Mirrors is defined by its vivid strings. They appear on every track, to command your attention, making it impossible to look away. New Love Cassette is vaguely reminiscent of some of the sleepy, lo-fi melodies in Burn Your Fire, but sparse, maddening orchestral production takes this track in a forward thinking direction. What It Is delivers synthy strings that sweep you away as it leads into album standout Impasse. Impasse features a new magnitude of strings layered around Angel’s vocals. It’s a James Bond worthy song that reminds me of Radiohead’s Spectre in the way it delicately traverses both melodic depths and soaring heights like,out of nothing, it was making a wild exclamation.
All Mirrors isn’t without quieter moments. Ballads like the euphoric and crooning Tonight space out the album as Angel presents a hazier and mellower side to her music. That song is breathtakingly sweet, a track that bustles with instrumentation you’d expect to hear in the poetics of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake or the hushed intrigue in Satie’s Gnossienne. Lush strings decorate these tracks in a way that lushly romanticises the beauty of her music. Other tracks opt for sparseness - Spring bustles with a retro, groovy synthesiser. In Summer Angel layers these bright melodies into a dry and arid, almost folky sound. Lyrically, penultimate track Endgame exhibits a bold depth as Angel chants “life carries on, just like a song / I sing but I don’t know” questioning not just her existence as an artist, but as a person.
Throughout All Mirrors, Angel Olsen showcases her boldest range of styles yet. Filled with intricate songcraft that seeps through the cracks between styles of classical music and bridges the gap between the romantic and the haunting. Angel Olsen is at the centre of it all: a commanding voice in contemporary music, and one we can hope remains so for the future. As she sings in album closer Chance, “Forever’s just so far”.
- Sean Tayler.