Angel Olsen @ HAU 1 Berlin | Saturday, 29.03.2014

Very often, the move from containment to connection is a difficult one. After all, there’s a lot at stake – one’s sense of self, most importantly – but sometimes, it comes naturally and easily.

For Missouri-born, singer-songwriter and guitarist Angel Olsen, the recording of her second album was a relaxed and enjoyable process, despite the fact that she was working on her own, highly personal material in creative collaboration for the first time, with musicians she’d been playing with for barely six months. That the three are now a band proper says much about not only their talent, but also the singer’s desire to push her extraordinarily compelling songs into new territory and watch them develop.

Angel Olsen | White Fire

Olsen, of course, has an impeccable cooperative pedigree. As a member of Emmett Kelly’s The Cairo Gang, she’s toured with Bonnie “Prince” Billy (on whose Wolfroy Goes To Town album she appeared) and has twice duetted with Marissa Nadler, to devastatingly minimal effect, but her first two recordings were very much Olsen in solo mode.

The kitchen-recorded, reverb-shrouded Strange Cacti EP from 2010 was almost spectral in its simplicity, while Half Way Home, her debut album of 2012 was a work of poetic profundity delivered on acoustic guitar, with mere hints of double bass and drums and by a remarkable voice. Now, Burn Your Fire For No Witness.

Angel Olsen | Windows
https://youtube.com/watch?v=92Ar3rMoQKo

It sees Olsen again exploring themes of place and belonging, loss and loneliness, but this time with drummer Josh Jaeger and bass player Stewart Bronaugh – the former a dramaturg/playwright and former colleague from her days working in a café in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the latter Jaeger’s band mate in garage-pop outfit ‘Lionlimb’– and using a much broader sound palette.

Olsen remains the dynamic nucleus of the band; her voice – equal parts Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison and Hope Sandoval – speaks (literally) loudest and her songs are profoundly personal. So much so that at times, it seems even listening is as intrusive as reading the pages of a private journal. But anguished though Olsen’s honesty can be, it’s not the stuff of dramatic torment. She speaks about letting her experiences “run through” her when she writes.