We tend to assign labels to musicians, and despite the variety of possible labels, we always end up using them: Beyoncé is a queen; athletes like Harry Styles who climb the charts without changing the culture are mere superstars; when Little Simz appeared, it was said that she was a promise: she maybe she today she is a princess; the Idles are punk, the Saults are experimental and Angel Olsen, at 35, is dogma.
Like Tomberlin, the girl who opened Angel Olsen’s concert yesterday in Capitólio (Lisbon), and who edited this year I don’t know who needs to hear this…It started out being labeled as a “folk ballad”: on those early EPs, more than a decade ago, it was a girl with an acoustic guitar endowed with an extraordinary voice, but still referring to confessional acoustic music.
This was not bad (on the contrary, many times it was very good), but it was far from making us guess what would happen after 2014: from Burn your fire without witnesses (since, there it is, 2014) and up to the most recent big moment (this year), Olsen never stopped experimenting, mixing genres, playing with song structures, discovering what he could do with his voice.
The pinnacle of all these changes was, perhaps, this Monday night, on stage, with a band – and the word stage is important, because in the end we end up wondering how it is possible that Olsen manages to bring unity to songs from so many albums. different, so opposite in terms of atmosphere, original instrumentation, tempo? No song remains untouched: what used to live in the synthesizers now shines thanks to the strings; what was slow now ascends where it was not expected; every arrangement changes, the vocal delivery isn’t a sticker on the records and we’re in that zone where we’re comfortable acknowledging a song we love but suddenly find ourselves thinking “Wait a minute, this wasn’t like that, what the heck”. the hell will happen later?
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Source: Observadora
