Angel Olsen doesn’t care about empty pleasantries, in conversations or her music. “I don’t like small talk,” the 35-year-old St. Louis singer and songwriter said in a recent New Yorker profile, as she drove through Asheville, NC, the city she’s called home for nearly a decade. Likewise, the songs on her amazing sixth album, “Big Time”, prefer to dive in depth.
“I had a dream last night / We had a fight / It lasted 25 years”, begins the straightforward title “Dream Thing”, an atmospheric ballad that represents an encounter with an ex and feels like an impromptu transfer from the subconscious. Later, on the plaintive, acoustic guitar-driven “This Is How It Works,” she goes into the chase even more directly: “I know you can’t talk long, but I can barely last.”
“Big Time” was recorded last year, at the end of a particularly tumultuous time in Olsen’s life: shortly after she came out to her parents – she had her first romantic relationship and subsequent breakup with a woman during the pandemic. – her father, when her mother both died within two months of each other from different diseases. While no explicit reference is made to these life-changing events on the album, “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, California, with producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous flow of heavy, transformative and invigorating, clear emotions.
Olsen’s voice has always been a strangely rousing instrument, like an imaginary folk trio of Roy Orbison, Karen Dalton and Lucinda Williams singing in tight harmony. On her exciting yet gritty 2012 debut album, “Half Way Home,” Olsen defiantly leaned into her vocal idiosyncrasies, imbued almost every note with an intense warble. Over the next decade, in a series of increasingly confident and ambitious records, she’s learned how to modulate those eccentricities, hitting them with increasingly blunt force. Her previous album, 2019’s “All Mirrors”, featured dark, almost gothic synth-rock and poignant forays into orchestral pop. On “Big Time” — the first album on which Olsen consciously sings about queer desire — she seizes on a particularly tradition-bound genre: country.
In a way it makes sense. Long before the eminently viral “sad girl” aesthetic (a somewhat reductive description that has stuck with the women of millennial indie rock like Olsen, Mitski, and Phoebe Bridgers), female country stars like Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette found the genre a welcome place to enjoy bottomless melancholy. Both artists feel like touchstones on “Big Time” (“I’ve never been too sad”, Olsen sings at one point, “Too sad that I can’t share”). But on torch songs like the grim “Ghost On” and the stunning “Right Now,” Olsen strikes a perfect balance between honoring the sounds of the country’s past and updating them to her own image. “Why did you have to make it weird?” she rings in one of the record’s most sonically grandiose moments – the soaring chorus of “Right Now” – a perfect bit of casual lyricism that makes this timeless-looking song uniquely hers.
The opener and lead single, “All the Good Times”, is a relaxed break-up song that Olsen wrote a few years before the album was recorded; she has said she initially intended to offer it to country star Sturgill Simpson, but it’s hard to imagine it in anyone else’s hands, with its weary benevolence and patient pace but still explosive emotional climax. “I can’t say I’m sorry if I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” Olsen sings atop light, splashing percussion and a lap steel that winks as if it’s in a Steve Miller song.
While the first half of the record doesn’t skimp on heartbreaking moments (“All the Flowers” is a standout, with Olsen’s intuitive crooner’s phrasing and gift for melody), “Big Time” crescendos in the second half, over a series of songs featuring two of contains the most devastating songs she has ever composed. The first is “Right Now,” a rural lament that turns at the last minute into a dissonant hard-eyed showdown à la Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Spring”: “I need you to look at me and listen,” says Olsen. “I am the past that comes back to haunt you.”
Then there’s “Go Home,” a graceful blaze of song that sounds like an outdated theater burning down in slow motion. “I want to go home,” Olsen whimpers like someone who knows it’s too late to “go back to the little things.” Her vocal performance is heartbreaking, but by the end of the song she has reached a sort of calm: “Forget the old dream,” she sings, “I got a new thing.”
Olsen’s music easily resists sentiment, and “Big Time” ends on an appropriately ambiguous note. If she wanted a straight forward happy ending, she might have decided on the lighthearted, lovelorn title track, which Olsen wrote with her current partner, Beau Thibodeaux. (The chorus revolves around one of their relationship’s intimate catchphrases: “I love you big time.”)
The record instead fades with “Chasing the Sun,” a track that also depicts a budding new love and features some of Olsen’s most playful lyrics — “write a postcard to you when you’re in the other room” — but it’s a powerful arrangement of piano and strings make it sound like an elegy. Olsen seems to be mulling over the transformative nature of grief once again: It may never go away completely, but over time, it may just give the hard-won good times an extra glow.
Angel Olsen
“Great time”
(Jagjaguwar)