Angel Olsen’s breakthrough album, 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, brought the St Louis-born songwriter into contact with those she calls “weirdos” – people who have been viscerally affected by her raw Americana-cum-grunge love songs. “How do I wrap my mind around connecting with people who are that lost?” she asked in a recent Guardian interview, while promoting her new record, My Woman.
Yet Olsen does nothing to discourage her flock. On the first night of her UK tour, she matches the crowd’s adoring heckles with her own form of banter: “If you want to be part of the show, you can join me on stage,” she tells one character, who had shouted at her during a funereal Lights Out, while another collapses into swooning giggles when she suggests meeting afterwards, “[because] you should give me a show”.
Her humour is as off-kilter as her music, which has lately been reconfigured to include electronic fuzz and drone alongside her reverb-drenched country-folk. Inspired by a failed relationship and questions around being young and female in America, My Woman slots together lyrics written from an isolated overthinker’s perspective – “even still, there is no escape” goes the tremulous Heart Shaped Face, one of tonight’s highlights – and a slammed-together cornucopia of genres. The climax of this is an encore comprised of two new songs, Intern and Woman – brave move, finishing with new ones instead of a favourite such as Forgiven/Forgotten – that she sculpts into a shape-shifting epic. It slips from Lana Del Rey-ish dark-heart atmospherica to a Can-like drone symphony, in the midst of which she stands calmly, pressing the sustain switch on a small keyboard.
Olsen is a hard-to-measure performer. Strapped behind a guitar most of the time, she’s not a bodily vocalist; all the action is from the neck up, as she taps into the Roy Orbison/Patsy Cline country-gothic well. But she’s wholly arresting: intensely feminine as she yearns for her gorgeous friend on Acrobat, luxuriantly exhaling the lyric on Sister. From first to last she commands the stage, and will soon dominate much larger venues than this.
- At Manchester Academy 14 October. Box office: 0161-832 1111. At Koko, London, 17 October. Box office: 020-7388 3222.
