Angel Olsen’s new record comes two and a half years after the breakthrough of Burn Your Fire For No Witness, which ended up on many year-end lists for sounding like a refreshing take on Leonard Cohen and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Everyone from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork proclaimed her one of the decade’s most exciting new folk auteurs.
Her new album obliterates that notion when the dreamy synths of opener Intern signal a completely different sonic universe than Burn Your Fire – one much more dynamic and expressive. Olsen can channel Mary Weiss on one song, Stevie Nicks the next without sounding beholden to either, while her band carries her to great heights without wavering. My Woman emphatically demonstrates that Olsen is much more than you thought she was, culminating in a soaring performance on penultimate track Woman, where the band swells dramatically while she sings, “I dare you to understand / what makes me a woman.”
Musically and thematically, My Woman is all about daring and defiance. Halfway through Not Gonna Kill You, Olsen digs in on a string-yanking riff and repeats it an uncomfortably long time, seemingly capable of an emotional threshold beyond most pop singers. It’s daring how she mixes her vocals deep into the red on Pops, or allows them to completely disappear into reverb during the most transcendent moment of Sister. It’s daring, too, that that song spends four minutes as a quiet masterpiece before shifting into a groove and working up to a surging emotional peak two more times.
While Olsen is capable of great subtlety, there is nothing self-effacing or minimalist about My Woman. It’s a determined album, almost to a fault, and like the romance hinted at in lead single Shut Up Kiss Me, the album is occasionally messy and frequently epic.
Top track: Not Gonna Kill You
Angel Olsen plays the Mod Club on September 24 and Lee’s Palace on September 25.
