More Break Up, More Shakeup
Amidst the hundreds upon hundreds of love-centric records released every year, it’s often the voice most heartbroken that stand to garner more attention. To be hurt and reeling from love usually ends in bitter affront, but to use that experience to self-reflect and find yourself looking upward rather than spiralling is the voice all-but-overlooked. Angel Olsen, a Missouri-born singer-songwriter, dares to betray this trend with her new album All Mirrors, a grand exposé of her own making that challenges the 32-year-old to dare to use her pain as a driving force for new revelations.
All Mirrors proves a staggering change of character for the indie-folk crooner. Three years after her last record My Woman, Olsen finds herself seeing all her flaws and achievements laid out in front of her, using them as benchmarks to further delve into her mistakes.
Accompanied by an orchestral arrangement, her sometimes sweeping, sometimes delicate vocal range is tempered perfectly by the strings that underline her every emotive twist and turn. Instrumentals swell and break, fold over each as if carried by the wave of Olsen’s voice – a conductor of all pillars across the album’s soundscape. The strings remain used in small measurements, merely complimenting an already stellar line up of melodies. Moments such as the potent hum of the low-end strings on ‘New Love Cassette’ are fleeting but serve to deepen the hazy, barebones compositions, while on ‘What It Is’, a jumping drum beat is tenderised by their presence.
All Mirrors is somewhat of a self-discovery, but it’d be cheap to call it a post-breakup album. The record finds Olsen bearing her every scar, her every regret and her every proclamation she discovers and she wades in and out of the waters that try to drag her under. Everything she experiences on All Mirrors – from love to heartbreak to reincarnation is all through the lens of her own making. Catharsis can often be deliberated by forces outside of our control, but here Olsen tightly grips the wheel of her own fragility, steering it whichever way she sees fit. From the sprawling, almost chaotic opener in ‘Lark’ to its indie-rock ballad closer ‘Chance’, the record holds your attention throughout with unpredictable emotional highs and lows.
At one point she can be humbled by her experience, at another she can command it – but you never get the sense that she’s beaten. She can come across intentionally bitter, such as on ‘Impasse’: “Take what’s left, and get out, tell them what it’s about” – but she remains steadfast and aware of how lucky to know love can be and to appreciate the now: “Don’t take it for granted / Love when you have it” (‘Spring’).
On the album’s keynote ‘Tonight’, where the string section takes charge and provides a bed for Olsen to whisper her quiet epiphanies on, she finds the ultimate realisation of self-worth “ I like the life that I lead / Without you”. Much like a lot of All Mirrors, if taken at face value, it can be received as sombre and drowned in self-pity, but it’s easy to forget that someone must first accept their own pain before they move beyond it. Angel Olsen’s fourth LP is a beautifully fragile and yet decisive record that knows nothing is promised when we only focus on what’s next, so it finds comfort in the reflections of itself – pain and all.
The High End Theory 
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