Angel Olsen
My Woman

“A snake, it takes no time to make a clean sweep of a henhouse.”
(W. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

“To lose the feeling of an endless searching through
How to have made what is never about me or you
That is the kind of love I’d always dreamed to be
However painful, let it break down all of me
‘Til I am nothing else but the feeling
Becoming true”.
[To lose the sensation of an endless search
As having done what never concerned me or you
This is the kind of love I’ve always dreamed of being
However painful, let it tear me down entirely
Until I am nothing else but the sensation
Of truly becoming it]
(Angel Olsen, Heart Shaped Face)

Angel Olsen is thirty years old but sings like a forty-five-year-old: when she whispers, she instills an oleaginous malice; when she controls herself, she has a transparent opacity; when she shrieks, she is captivating. The talented American singer-songwriter from St. Louis, a former grocery store clerk and former backup singer for Will Oldham aka Bonny “Prince” Billy, has defined her artistic signature, lo-fi folk, from the very beginning. Certainly, it is the most suitable for a girl who grew up in the '90s, after being adopted by a “Bradford” family in Missouri with already seven biological children; it is worth listening to the diaphanous If It’s Alive, It Will from the sparse debut “Strange Cacti” (2011), an EP apparently recorded in a broom cupboard.

“My Woman” from 2016 (Jagjaguwar), her third studio album, so far followed only by a collection of outtakes, is entirely imbued with uncompromising and authentic writing, intimate yet disdainful, clear because it is audacious. It exemplifies more genres than in recent past. In the first part, it proceeds with decisive, vigorous tracks, indebted to the priestess of rock or the PJ Harvey who haunted her in “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”, but also fatally attracted to girl groups; along the intimate and philosophical ballads of the second part, it becomes both reflective and poignant (Lisa Germano and Cat Power can be points of reference). Although she is often compared to names like PJ Harvey and Fleetwood Mac with Stevie Nicks, she is sufficiently personal, both in interpretations and even more so in songwriting, to earn the recognition of a mature authorial independence.

In this LP, she develops the theme of being a woman, through various perspectives on a relationship at its end, with songs somewhat languid in melody but with an iconic spleen and irreducibly contemporary. Femininity is expressed in a hieratic decalogue, where warm and cold tones, energy and insecurity blend: the power of weakness thus acts on the weakness of power. A small subversive human resistance, at least educational, for the benefit of introverted, lanky but resilient dreamers. If the haziness and sluggishness of lo-fi is a distant horizon, we owe it to the resolute transition by Olsen from indie folk to auteur rock, in an album with a disjointed linearity because it interprets a rawly keen and defenseless emotionality, which authenticates its dramatic nature.

Two parts, therefore, distinguish the work, to which are added the intro Intern, unusually electronic (80s keyboards and Lynch-like tones, with a moving falsetto ending: "Doesn't matter who you are or what you do/ Something in the world will make a fool of you/ Pick up the phone but I swear it's the last time/ Pick up the phone but I swear it's the last time"/ It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do/ something in the world will turn you into a pitiful fool/ pick up the phone, but I swear it’s the last time/ pick up the phone, I swear it’s the last time) and the outro Pops, a piano and voice ballad shrouded in a dark and solitary aura (a lullaby with the exhausted languor of Lana Del Ray but the charm of Cat Power, and an epiphanic text: "Don’t forget it’s our song, I’ll be the thing that lives in the dream when it’s gone"/ Do not forget that it’s our song, I will be the thing that lives in the dream when it has faded). We thus move from the 90s guitarism of Not Gonna Kill You and the Nirvana-like chord progression of Give It Up, to the glittering Shut Up, Kiss Me, a multifaceted retro rock, both velvety and aggressive, as passionate as Never Be Mine, with an affably seductive power-pop refrain. If the midday indolence of Heart Shaped Face is marked also by Emily Elhaj’s nice dripping bass, Sister is an expansive alt-country piece (where inextricable rhymes nestle like “And all this blessing was a course/ before I opened up my purse”/ And all this blessing was a course/ before I opened my purse). If Those Were Days is a enveloping torch song, in Woman Olsen’s voice becomes even imploring and sensual, longing for quiet and ecstasy, but with such mournful tones that they could suit Beth Gibbons. In this song, the songwriter proverbially declares “I dare you to understand what makes me a woman”.

Well, female rock, the rock of the 2010s, despite “a snake, it takes no time to make a clean sweep of a henhouse”, has its new muse who, lo and behold, has seven siblings in Missouri and, in her small way, supports –with a percentage on the sales of "My Woman"- Doctors Without Borders. And she sings proudly:

Shut up kiss me
Hold me tight
Shut up kiss me
Hold me tight
Stop your crying
It's alright
Shut up kiss me
Hold me tight

(Shut up, kiss me/Hold me tight
Shut up, kiss me/Hold me tight
Stop crying/It’s all right
Shut up, kiss me/Hold me tight).