The Real Angel Olsen Has Arrived

As someone who does the whole “having critical opinions about music” thing, I often find myself forming backseat ideas of where artists I feel have potential should go with their work. I’m sure all fans do this on some level, where they form expectations for upcoming releases and hope it lives up to them. But I don’t know if people who aren’t deep into this music criticism hole can fully appreciate how satisfying it is when an artist does exactly what you hoped they would.

Angel Olsen has done that on her new single, “All Mirrors,” which is my favorite song of the year by some margin, to the point that I’m listening to it almost non-stop, and when I’m doing anything else I’m thinking “I wish I was listening to ‘All Mirrors’ right now.” This is one of those perfect songs where the artist finally figures out who she is (or at least who I want her to be, which works all the same in my book).

I’m not a big fan of folk/alt country music, so I wasn’t too interested in Olsen’s acclaimed early albums. It wasn’t until her last album, My Woman, that I thought she showed how much talent and charisma she has, particularly on songs like “Shut Up Kiss Me” and its psychedelic centerpiece, “Sister.” On her new single, she’s ditched the guitars entirely and gone full-blown dramatic synth goth. It’s a breathtaking song and video that warrants comparisons to the heavy-hitters of this style of large-scale pop: Kate Bush and Björk (especially the Homogenic and Vulnicura eras). But Olsen’s voice is distinctive enough that it doesn’t feel like she’s copying anyone — this sound is hers more than any of her previous material.

It’s funny that this comes on the heels of that Sleater-Kinney song, where the band went synth and it didn’t fit any of them and made no sense. Whereas on this song, Olsen is exactly where she should be. Her voice sounds better than it ever has in this setting and her lyrics are actually more impactful when surrounded by the cinematic synths, beats, and strings. I’m not one to comment on artists’ appearances much, but I also feel a certain journalistic responsibility to point out that she looks like a god in this video, which has kind of a Sunset Boulevard vibe when combined with the lyrics about “losing beauty.” Every element of this just fits and if this represents the direction of her next album, I am very excited.

Something that has always bothered me about the discourse surrounding folk music is this assumption that artists who only play a guitar and whisper in their songs convey more authenticity and emotion than artists who go for bigger, more dramatic sounds. There are already plenty of counterpoints to that, but this song proves that Olsen’s music is more powerful and real than ever, even as she leaves that style in the dust.

Sarah McLachlan is Cool

I have a bit of an affinity for artists who are uncool, which might be why I’ve been thinking about Sarah McLachlan lately. McLachlan meets almost all the criteria required to be a vastly uncool artist: she’s a woman who sings slow, serious, feelingsy music that sounds like something your mom would listen to, she’s popular even though it’s impossible to find anyone who owns her albums, and her all-women’s festival from the late-90s, Lilith Fair, is now associated more with embarrassing Clinton-era white feminism than the current hip progressive movement. I’m guessing most people my age know her most for her appearance in those viewer-shaming ASPCA ads where her extremely sappy song “Angel” plays to shots of depressed dogs.

Due to that uncoolness, I don’t think I’ve seen a single artist I listen to mention McLachlan as an inspiration for their work, even though a lot of current indie music has more in common with her than they want to admit. I started thinking about this when I was really into Emma Ruth Rundle’s Marked For Death album in 2016. When trying to think of who Rundle reminded me of, for some reason McLachlan’s name popped in my mind. They probably have nearly no similarities in terms of background or actual influence, but I thought Rundle’s slow-burn balladry wasn’t too far off from something McLachlan would have made if she had been into metal.

From there, I began to connect McLachlan’s reputation as a punch-line to other albums I felt were overlooked for committing similar crimes in terms of being earnest, feminine, and unexciting. Albums like Bat For Lashes’ The Bride and Mary Timony’s Mountains suddenly started to feel more closely linked to McLachlan than I would have guessed. And I began to wonder if, beyond all the cultural baggage, there was something worth exploring here, which led me to try actually listening to more of her music than just the three or four songs everyone knows from the radio.

Listening to her two most popular albums, 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and 1997’s Surfacing, confirmed a lot of what I suspected. It’s not amazing music to me by any means because sonically it’s about as adventurous as a trip to the post office. But there were also some surprises: for one, McLachlan has more of an edge than I assumed from just hearing songs like “Angel” and “I Will Remember You.” Her lyrics are smart and have an actual bite to them a lot of the time, and while her songs skew towards ballads, there was also a lot that didn’t sound too different from current indie folk. She was also capable of writing undeniable singles like “Possession” and one of the biggest jams of the 90s, “Building a Mystery.”

What stuck out most, though, was just the way McLachlan sings, with so much sincerity, emotion and conviction. Obviously it can be considered sappy or maudlin, but I found there to be a genuineness in her songs and their construction compared to most music at similar levels of popularity. Its commercial viability seems more like a coincidence than anything — the feeling I got was that McLachlan just made her music and it happened to connect with listeners. It doesn’t have the sense of calculation that ruins so much poppy music for me.

Obviously McLachlan didn’t invent being a woman who sings about feelings, but I think the success of her music and the concept of Lilith Fair helped make it feel more normal. When I grew up, I just heard songs by McLachlan on the radio without ever seeking them out. I’m guessing a lot of current artists also did, and even if they’re not actively listening to McLachlan and citing her as an influence, her mere existence probably paved the way for many who grew up hearing that voice playing on the radio or in supermarkets.

One of the best developments in the last few years of indie has been a boom in women singer-songwriters, who are getting more acclaim and support than ever before. The funny thing is that a ton of them sing like McLachlan, and some even make music that overtly sounds like hers. An artist like Weyes Blood, whose excellent album Titanic Rising is the most acclaimed of the year thus far, is basically making adult contemporary for the indie set. Maybe McLachlan’s style has finally come around to being cool.

There is some comedic value in reading artists and writers totally dance around mentioning McLachlan because her music is so associated with being lame. I’m as guilty of it as anyone: if I saw an artist on Bandcamp saying they were influenced by McLachlan, I’d probably assume it was some soft pop nonsense that’s “not for me.” But then I’ll write about artists like Weyes Blood and how amazing they are without even considering the hypocrisy.

This all leads me to believe that McLachlan is the victim of typical garbage narratives surrounding gender and coolness. Similar to how many dismiss “chick flicks,” this music gets a bad rap because it has an appeal to an audience that has been deemed to be less worthy or important. Meanwhile, the same people who scoff at her are probably listening to man-in-a-cabin folk and indie-approved feminine soft pop without even realizing the similarities. With so many acclaimed artists working in a similar space, McLachlan is overdue for some credit.

I Wish This New Sleater-Kinney Song Wasn’t Crappy

The act of reuniting your band is inherently sort of pathetic. Even if it’s done for reasons other than shameless cash-grabbing, it’s often an attempt by the members to recapture their glory years, like a popular kid returning to high school years later. Maybe the saddest part of some reunions is that one often gets the sense that the artists involved could be doing something new and cool, but instead they’re stuck acting as old versions of themselves, playing the same songs because they felt a need to give in to fans who always want more.

I know all of this, but when Sleater-Kinney reunited, I convinced myself this would be different. I ignored some of the obvious warning signs, like Carrie Brownstein’s burgeoning career of making hipster jokes on Portlandia and appearing in American Express commercials. When their reunion album dropped, I wanted it to be great more than anything, but after a couple listens I knew it wasn’t. I figured it was their first album back and maybe they just needed to get back in the swing of things.

Now they have a new album coming out produced by Annie Clark, which would have been my dream about ten years ago, but now feels like a worst case scenario for all people involved. The latest song, “The Future is Here,” confirmed all of my worst suspicions about this project: it’s a trainwreck that I’ll use as exhibit A when I argue for making band reunions illegal in front of the Supreme Court.

About the only positive thing I can say about this track is that the band tried something different rather than rehashing their old music, and I think it came from a place of wanting to push themselves artistically. But what they’ve done is take everything that made Sleater-Kinney cool and unique and replaced it with boring, generic sounds. This isn’t Bob Dylan going electric; this is like if Kevin Shields followed up Loveless with an album of acoustic Imagine Dragons covers.

The twin guitars and harmonies of Corin Tucker and Brownstein are absent here, replaced by some stale synths that make the song sound like a mid-2000s Yeah Yeah Yeahs album track. The other vital element of Sleater-Kinney’s music has always been Janet Weiss’ drumming — the urgency and intensity of the band’s sound came through in her aggressive style, which conveyed a sense of passion, like the song you were listening to really mattered. On this song, she’s marginalized to just playing a simple, lifeless drum beat, which renders the entire song limp and purposeless. The lyrics don’t exactly help either — it’s not like S-K were ever masters of subtlety, but the “actually, iPhones are bad” theme doesn’t inspire a lot of deep thought, which might be why half the song is spent on “na na na”s.

I’m trying to mentally picture what happened in this recording session. Clearly the band wanted to push themselves in new directions and Annie Clark was happy to oblige. I was critical of Clark’s last album, which I thought pursued a generic, soulless pop vision that prioritized superficial gimmickry over real artistry. Now it appears S-K has been caught in her vortex of making corny, instantly dated pop. The album cover has the image of Brownstein with her backwards butt exposed, which is an image that feels inspired by Clark’s recent propensity towards contrived, phony “weirdness.” My best guess is the band and Clark were shooting for some poppy-but-deep artsy thing, but they really did not succeed on any level. It’s enough to make me lose faith in everyone involved, all of whom were at one point among my favorite artists in the world.

It had been awhile since I’d really listened to Sleater-Kinney, so I decided to throw on The Woods on my drive to work to see if maybe I had just outgrown the band. That would have been sad in its own way, but preferable to the reality this song presents. It turns out The Woods still kicks ass. Just listen to “The Fox” and compare it to this song. That album was the ultimate farewell, a band going out in a blaze of glory by unleashing every emotion they had left and leaving on top of their game. Instead, it’s become another cautionary example for future bands and their fans: sometimes its better to quit when you’re ahead.