Sunny Side of Angel Olsen

Who says Angel Olsen never smiles? ^_^

Best Shows of 2013: Angel Olsen at the Media Club, April 21

My first time seeing Angel Olsen, one of my favourite musicians of 2012. She lived up to all of my expectations and was the first good show I saw at the Media Club. It was also the first time I saw people sit on the floor during a headliner, but because they were in a focused hush.

The following excerpt is taken from my review of this show for Vancouver Weekly:


Up until Angel Olsen, I was starting to think the Media Club was cursed for me. My first time there was the only time I walked out of a show. I nearly had to leave during Chelsea Wolfe and King Dude because my mildly sore throat from the night before blossomed into a full-on fever during the show; simply standing still was painful, especially as I fought off the chills while wearing two layers and a jacket indoors. And Terry Malts, one of my favourite bands in 2012, only managed to pull off a lukewarm set at the Media Club despite their Ramones-ripping pop-punk.

“Luck” would have it that I walked into the Media Club this past Sunday with a killer chest cold, the same one that forced me to skip Nervous Talk and Crystal Swells on Record Store Day (if you were at Neptoon Records, you know how suffocatingly hot the store got during and after the Evaporators). But the St. Louis-born, Chicago-based Angel Olsen’s debut full-length album Half Way Home was one of my favourite releases of 2012, so there was no way I was letting anything stop me from seeing her live.

Angel Olsen kicked off week three of her current tour at the Media Club. It’s her first West Coast tour, but more significantly, it’s her first tour with a backing band. And though she’s expressed uncertainty as to where her writing and performing will go now that she’s working with a band, that was part of the excitement as much for me as I’m sure it is for her.

I don’t know how long Olsen’s been playing with drummer Joshua Jaeger, bassist Stewart Bronaugh and cellist Danah Olivetree, but they sounded so right together that I never would have thought they formed just for this tour. By the second song, “Drunk and with Dreams”, Olsen showed that with this new outfit, she could rock. The hardest rocking of all (and most altered from the recorded version) was “The Sky Opened Up”, my surprise hit of the night.

There’s always a question of whether or not voices that are usually only heard in intimate settings, especially voices as humanly fragile as Olsen’s, can be sustained when belted out. I was happy to hear that as loud and distinct as the bass, drums and cello were, Olsen’s voice rose above them all. The strength of her voice really showed when she sang acoustic over her own electric guitar and by how loudly her voice took over the room even when she stood a fair distance from her mic.

Olsen’s only mildly unimpressive moments were actually the two songs I’d looked forward to the most, the more uptempo “The Waiting” and “Sweet Dreams”. But they were only the slightest bit unimpressive because they were the only songs she didn’t give a unique, live band spin.

Half Way Home marked the beginning of a breakthrough year for Angel Olsen in 2012. Her rise only continues in 2013 with the January release of her new Sleepwalker 7” and her recent signing to Indiana label Jagjaguwar. If you hadn’t heard of Angel Olsen before, you surely will soon. And there’s a good chance when that happens that one of Olsen’s final lines of the night will resonate with you the way it resonated with me: as I left the Media Club, although I didn’t couldn’t identify the song, I found myself repeating her last words in my head: “I’ll never forget you all of my life.”

Angel Olsen Performs New Song "Forgiven/Forgotten" at Pitchfork Music Festival 2013

Angel Olsen's new album will be so damned good - whenever it comes out. The way she sings "I don't know anything" and how the drums come in just at the right time. Oh, daaammmnnn:

Seeing Angels

Name your city. I will wire you money to see Angel Olsen (transit fare not included). My review of Angel Olsen with Villages live at the Media Club will be posted in Vancouver Weekly in a day or two.

Back To the Media Club

Angel Olsen's debut album Half Way Home was one of my favourites releases of 2012, and even though I'm 0-2 for good experiences at the Media Club, I'll be going back when she comes to Vancouver on April 21. Here's "The Waiting," the least doomy song on the album:

Favourite Releases of 2012: Preamble and First Entry

There are three reasons why I never make year-end "best-of" lists: 1) I find them too time-consuming to compose. 2) I usually don't hear enough good music that won't already appear on every other best-of list. 3) I find ranking and rating equally frustrating, impossible and pointless. But this year, I feel I've heard enough music that may (or may not) have been overlooked, so I've decided to give making a list another shot.

As I have around thirty releases in mind, l've decided to attempt mini-reviewing one release per day until the New Year, despite blogging having stalled over the past couple of months. Call this an exercise against writer's block - in writing concisely and prolifically without over-thinking grammar and structure (two of my most formidable roadblocks in becoming a serious writer). And in order to save myself the headache of ranking my favourites, I've decided to simply list them alphabetically.


Angel Olsen - Half Way Home (Bathetic)

2012 was a year of folk revival for me, incited by new discoveries such as Chelsea Wolfe and the late Bert Jansch, having embraced Nico's 1967 album Chelsea Girl as one of my favourite albums of all time and pushed forward most significantly by Canadian filmmaker James Cullingham's documentary In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey, a long-overdue definitive biography of the late American guitarist which debuted at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival.

While not as haunting as Wolfe's "doom-folk," musically delicate or emotionally naked as even Bert Jansch's least moving pieces or environmentally transformative as the soundscapes conjured by John Fahey, Angel Olsen's greatest draw for me is the tension that exists within her music: her quivery treble rings out so pronouncedly against the inviting warmth of her clean and relatively spare arrangements (usually no more than twangy acoustics). Half Way Home opens with a song called "Acrobat," a title that could describe her singing which she topically demonstrates right out of the gate. If Angel Olsen can retain the amount of originality found in her voice alone, she'll definitely be an artist to keep an eye on in the coming year.