I had what I considered kind of a big, important review for Dusted, which ran at the inexplicable hour of about 10 p.m on Sunday (It's PFK's lead review today...), so I guess no one will see it, but here it is:
"Angel Olsen has a prickly kind of intensity. She reveals herself in hushed confession then flutters away in vibrato-laced trills and abstractions, leading you into quiet contemplation one minute and shattering your serenity with a banshee keen the next. She has a beautiful voice when it suits her. Her work on Bonnie Prince Billy’s Wolfroy Goes to Town was pure lushness and pleasure.
Still, there’s a danger there, an unmoored, unhinged flood of feeling that spills over the edges of her songs. By 2012’s chilling Half Way Home, you could sense a feral energy just under wraps. When I saw her last fall, performing mostly that last album, but a few tunes from the current one, that wildness had come much closer to the surface. Sharpness poked out of even her softest songs. A punk yelp, a rockabilly yodel slipped glass shards and knife edges into her folk-leaning murmurs. For about half the set, she had a rock band, the same on that appears on Burn Your Fire for No Witness — Joshua Jaeger on drums, Stewart Bronaugh on additional guitar."
MOre
This record is probably going to be on my top ten for 2014, not that anyone cares.
I think I am probably putting too much time into Dusted. I may back off a little.
Showing posts with label Angel Olsen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angel Olsen. Show all posts
Monday, February 17, 2014
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Angel Olsen
My live review of the Angel Olsen/Pillars & Tongues show is running as a feature at Blurt today.
RARE AIR: Angel Olsen
On Oct. 1, songstress Angel Olsen and Windy City pals Pillars and Tongues utterly captivated a Northampton, Mass. audience at the storied Iron Horse venue. BLURT’s contributing editor was there to bear witness.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
Two Chicago bands – one stuffed to the gills with equipment and instruments, the other spare as a twig in winter – played Northampton’s Iron Horse last week (Oct. 1). Pillars and Tongues, a trio, wove dense, drone-y layers of violin, synthesizer, bass guitar and harmonium into enveloping textures. Angel Olsen, touring in support of her recently-released Half Way Home album, sketched a stark landscape with folk guitar, minimal bass and drums and her extraordinarily expressive voice.
More
RARE AIR: Angel Olsen
On Oct. 1, songstress Angel Olsen and Windy City pals Pillars and Tongues utterly captivated a Northampton, Mass. audience at the storied Iron Horse venue. BLURT’s contributing editor was there to bear witness.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
Two Chicago bands – one stuffed to the gills with equipment and instruments, the other spare as a twig in winter – played Northampton’s Iron Horse last week (Oct. 1). Pillars and Tongues, a trio, wove dense, drone-y layers of violin, synthesizer, bass guitar and harmonium into enveloping textures. Angel Olsen, touring in support of her recently-released Half Way Home album, sketched a stark landscape with folk guitar, minimal bass and drums and her extraordinarily expressive voice.
More
Monday, September 30, 2013
Two ways to wake up in the morning
Gorgeous morning today, went to the Y just to change, then out for a run, still a little foggy both weather-wise and alert-ness wise, and I came screamingly, joltingly into focus with music from the Body.
Here's the tag line from their Thrill Jockey page:
Oh yeah, and in case you didn't get the biblical overtones in the band name, the current album is called Christs, Redeemers...plural, that will really bother some people, won't it?
It's remarkable that just two guys -- Chip King and Lee Buford -- make all this racket, or maybe not, considering they're from Rhode Island and have to compete with all that Lightning Bolt legacy.
Anyway, it's awesome and epic and only metal in the loosest possible sense...but I can't really recommend it for your iPod clock radio. Here's a bit:
Now it's later and I'm done running and have had some coffee, so naturally I am listening to something far gentler, far softer and more welcoming...something, in fact, that might be perfect for easing into a morning run, except for the danger of nodding away and veering off the sidewalk. It's an EP called Eternality by an LA-based film composer and electronic guy named Cuscino...lovely cool, rhythmic, faintly unsettling textures of electronics and voices.
Let's see what else...I am terrified that my paying job is just going to stop dead again, as it has half a dozen times since the global meltdown when the Republicans do something insane. (Let's tie the CR to mandatory baptism, full immersion, too, fuck that sprinkling shit.) Who cares about the country or the global economy when you get the chance to stick it to Obama once more, right?
Also I'm interviewing Zachary Cale this evening, not prepped at all. after I thrash around pointlessly trying to get some work this morning, I'm going to start working on that.
And finally, I am going to see Angel Olsen and Pillars and Tongues tomorrow and will be writing it up for Blurt.
Here's the tag line from their Thrill Jockey page:
“There’s heaviness. There’s brutality. Then there’s The Body.” – Metal Sucks
Oh yeah, and in case you didn't get the biblical overtones in the band name, the current album is called Christs, Redeemers...plural, that will really bother some people, won't it?
It's remarkable that just two guys -- Chip King and Lee Buford -- make all this racket, or maybe not, considering they're from Rhode Island and have to compete with all that Lightning Bolt legacy.
Anyway, it's awesome and epic and only metal in the loosest possible sense...but I can't really recommend it for your iPod clock radio. Here's a bit:
Now it's later and I'm done running and have had some coffee, so naturally I am listening to something far gentler, far softer and more welcoming...something, in fact, that might be perfect for easing into a morning run, except for the danger of nodding away and veering off the sidewalk. It's an EP called Eternality by an LA-based film composer and electronic guy named Cuscino...lovely cool, rhythmic, faintly unsettling textures of electronics and voices.
Let's see what else...I am terrified that my paying job is just going to stop dead again, as it has half a dozen times since the global meltdown when the Republicans do something insane. (Let's tie the CR to mandatory baptism, full immersion, too, fuck that sprinkling shit.) Who cares about the country or the global economy when you get the chance to stick it to Obama once more, right?
Also I'm interviewing Zachary Cale this evening, not prepped at all. after I thrash around pointlessly trying to get some work this morning, I'm going to start working on that.
And finally, I am going to see Angel Olsen and Pillars and Tongues tomorrow and will be writing it up for Blurt.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Angel Olsen
This lady's got a really interesting, arresting voice, which I may have gone slightly over the top in trying to describe...the review's from today's Dusted.
Angel Olsen
Halfway Home
Bathetic
Angel Olsen was the behind-the-scenes heroine of Bonnie Prince Billy’s last album, Wolfroy Comes to Town, her voice a luminous aura, a down-home cackle, a blues-y scrape and roll, a sacred harp harmony around Oldham’s cracked tenor. Here, on her second solo album (counting limited-release, cassette-only Strange Cacti from 2011), she brings that instrument out in front, singing 11 emotionally-freighted original songs, with the merest hint of instrumentation — strummed guitar, terse bass, occasional drums and pump organ.
Olsen’s vocal technique is unorthodox, guttural, nearly feral at times. She has evidently never had a singing lesson, and that’s not a complaint, because her wildness is utterly compelling. She often starts in a matter of fact way, murmuring breathy melodies against a backdrop of guitar picking. Her “Acrobat,” Halfway Home’s first song, circles in waltz-time, its melody (not too different from Delibes’s “Waltz from Copelia”) side-stepping up the scale, her voice quiet, fresh and unshowy. It sounds like she is standing next to you, maybe to one side, with her breath tickling your ear. Yet, as she rounds the first verse, her voice turns unpredictable, flickering up octaves like a wildfire catching. “I want to be the bed you mess,” she confides, finding a cavernous physicality in her girlish voice, a hollowed, animal-like, bluesy sound that goes straight to your spine and sets off a tingle. There’s something exciting about the way she sings, something predatory and dangerous about the way she soars up into a high note, seizes it, still wiggling with vibrato, and drags it back to earth.
More
Angel Olsen
Halfway Home
Bathetic
Angel Olsen was the behind-the-scenes heroine of Bonnie Prince Billy’s last album, Wolfroy Comes to Town, her voice a luminous aura, a down-home cackle, a blues-y scrape and roll, a sacred harp harmony around Oldham’s cracked tenor. Here, on her second solo album (counting limited-release, cassette-only Strange Cacti from 2011), she brings that instrument out in front, singing 11 emotionally-freighted original songs, with the merest hint of instrumentation — strummed guitar, terse bass, occasional drums and pump organ.
Olsen’s vocal technique is unorthodox, guttural, nearly feral at times. She has evidently never had a singing lesson, and that’s not a complaint, because her wildness is utterly compelling. She often starts in a matter of fact way, murmuring breathy melodies against a backdrop of guitar picking. Her “Acrobat,” Halfway Home’s first song, circles in waltz-time, its melody (not too different from Delibes’s “Waltz from Copelia”) side-stepping up the scale, her voice quiet, fresh and unshowy. It sounds like she is standing next to you, maybe to one side, with her breath tickling your ear. Yet, as she rounds the first verse, her voice turns unpredictable, flickering up octaves like a wildfire catching. “I want to be the bed you mess,” she confides, finding a cavernous physicality in her girlish voice, a hollowed, animal-like, bluesy sound that goes straight to your spine and sets off a tingle. There’s something exciting about the way she sings, something predatory and dangerous about the way she soars up into a high note, seizes it, still wiggling with vibrato, and drags it back to earth.
More
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