Hometown: St Louis.
The lineup: Angel Olsen (vocals, guitar), Josh Jaeger (drums), Stewart Bronaugh (bass).
The background: Angel Olsen is one of those rising artists who are already much loved by the sorts of people who don't pay much attention to ones-to-watch lists, even as they make a mental note to watch her very closely indeed. She's all about intimacy, if not scrutiny, although she's increasingly having to get used to being on the receiving end of that. She sings songs and plays guitar in such a way as to make you feel as though you're the only one listening to her at any given moment. Her audience may be growing - has been, in fact, since the release of her debut full-length album, 2012's Half Way Home - but you'll never feel like part of a crowd, just a series of individuals, atomised and alone, with a shared sense of isolation and desolation.
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If Olsen - who has toured and recorded with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - sings about the futility and finality of existence, she does so with gusto and verve, and a crack in the voice, a sob, that has seen her compared to Loretta Lynn. She also gives good vocal quaver, reminiscent of nobody female at all, but rather of Roy Orbison. Musically, there are hints of the Velvet Underground, of Mazzy Star's spectral acoustica, of country and alt rock. Sometimes she whispers, and it seems to come from the pre-electric era. Other times, she makes us think of an Appalachian woman discovering grunge a century ahead of schedule, like Courtney Love getting all hot and bothered with a guitar in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in 1894. Always, it is hard to tell where her anguish ends and her anger begins. You get the impression of someone exercised by the memory of her adoption at a young age, someone wrestling with deep existential doubt while trying to live life to the full. "It's like reaching a wall with something," she has said, "and the step before you're just about to give up is… 'c'mon, man! Stop being so negative and open a window!' Life is hard, but every day, we have to make even a little bit of sunlight matter."
Half Way Home was more skeletal folk. The follow-up, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, is a rockier affair, albeit a low, rumbling kind of rock, pent-up, brooding with a side order of bright. It is indeed the sound of someone opening a window - in the sense of letting in a little light (these things being relative) as well, of course, of allowing you in to read her most private thoughts. It was recorded with John Congleton, who's produced Bill Callahan and St. Vincent, in a deconsecrated chapel called Echo Mountain in Asheville, North Carolina over 10 days in July and is "a collection of songs, grown in a year of heartbreak, travel, and transformation". It's hardly Stooshe - on the opening track Unfucktheworld she sings, "I wanted nothing more than for this to be the end" and sounds as though she means it - but there is hope here. On Forgiven/Forgotten - the would-be grunge pop hit - she even manages to make her cry of "I don't know anything!" sound exultant. And there's a self-awareness to the self-excoriating: she even sings, "I feel so lonesome I could cry", on Hi-Five. White Fire is the emotional, resonant centrepiece. "Everything is tragic, it all just falls apart," she declares, ahead of the mother of all Proustian rushes, prompted by a random sound: "I heard my mother thinking me right back into my birth." Happy Monday, everyone.
The buzz: "Comforts the lonely" - Wall Street Journal.
The truth: Bound to cause a deconsecrated stir in 2014.
Most likely to: Live through this.
Least likely to: Join Stooshe.
What to buy: Burn Your Fire For No Witness is released on February 18 by Jagjaguwar.
File next to: Neko Case, Joanna Newsom, Nina Nastasia, Hope Sandoval.
Links: angelolsen.com.
Tuesday's new band: Last Lynx.
