All Mirrors is a gorgeous art pop album to carry those in heartbreak
Angel Olsen has had a bit of an unpredictable career in music. She started out making Americana and folk songs, shifted to lo-fi indie rock on her next album, and played around with some pop and rock and roll on her third album. This is partly because she has a wide variety of influences, ranging from Patsy Cline to Roy Orbison to Bob Dylan. It’s also partly because she wanted to break free of the “sad girl” aesthetic people had attached to her earlier music.
With her 2019 art pop album All Mirrors, Olsen has continued to reinvent herself as an artist with the use of sumptuous orchestral arrangements and poppy synths that hark back to 80s synth pop.
The album begins with “Lark”, a six-minute odyssey of the breakdown in a relationship marked by the drum beat of some kind of march and a quiet, two-minute interlude where Olsen reflects on a lover who fails to support her in her dreams.
At the beginning of the song, you can hear the violins, the violas, the cellos and whatnot warm up as if you’re in a concert hall, ready to hear a symphonic orchestra play. It’s a small touch, but it works well to raise expectations for the rest of the album: that this will be a stirring and theatrical production.
The drum beats get louder and louder in a crescendo until Angel Olsen sings at the top of her lungs, “Hiding out inside my head, it’s me again, it’s no surprise I’m on my own now.” Like we’ve heard in her previous albums, Olsen makes sense of her solitude. In Burn Your Fire For No Witness, Olsen sang about the honor of living your life fully despite being alone. This time, though, as we hear later in the album, she expresses the comforts of being alone after a troublesome relationship.
What follows in this album produced by John Congleton is a lush, expansive orchestral arrangement that accompanies eight of the eleven tracks on the album. The highly stylized production is sumptuous, melodramatic, bombastic, ornate, dreamlike, and theatrical to a point that some listeners may find it overwhelming.
Angel Olsen had originally recorded some spare, acoustic versions of the songs at church studio The Unknown in Anacortes, Washington following a breakup. Then, in collaboration with Ben Babbitt, who composes scores for films (and shares some songwriting credits with Olsen on the album), and Jherek Bischoff, an orchestral composer with a rock background, she revamped the songs with an orchestral arrangement blended with some poppy synths.
It’s an inventive, sonically cohesive album with elements of genres from many different eras: 80s synth pop, gothic pop, jazz, country, and even 50s doo-wop. With this instrumentation, Olsen sings with a voice that is at times dreamy, intimate, airy, powerful, and, sleeker compared to her warbly and kind of nasally singing on previous albums.
The revamp makes the album both wonderfully theatrical and melodramatic like an old Hollywood movie with some MGM strings. This is strikingly combined with Olsen’s still somewhat introspective songwriting seen from previous albums that lends this one the atmosphere of a somewhat gothic drama.
Olsen takes a deep dive into synth pop on the second track “All Mirrors” where she sings about losing her beauty as she grows older and the authenticity of ourselves: “standing, facing, all mirrors are erasing, losing beauty, at least at times it knew me.”
With bombast piled upon bombast, the album then becomes gentle with some dream pop in “Too Easy”, a song where Angel Olsen finds a reason to leave a relationship. It’s in stark contrast to the song that comes after, “New Love Cassette”, where Angel Olsen sings about how supportive she’d be in a relationship with a lover who is distant and seemingly lifeless. The drumbeat in “New Love Cassette” has a relentless drive and there’s a wonderfully aggressive and unpredictable spasm of strings halfway through the song.
“Spring” is a wonderfully dreamy love song that begins with some catchy piano and Mellotron and features some of the best songwriting on the album. In “Spring”, Olsen acknowledges just how much a person can begin a new life and fail to know her lover as time moves by quickly:
Don’t take it for granted
Love when you have it
You might be looking over
A lonelier shoulder
Remember when we said
We’d never have children
I’m holdin’ your baby
Now that we’re older
Follow that up with the up-tempo song “What It Is” that sounds a bit like a St. Vincent song combined with some more unpredictable, even playful strings as Olsen sings about people who begin romantic relationships merely to fill emotional voids in their lives.
The next song “Impasse” signifies to me a turning point in the album. The first minute of the song builds slowly with tense strings as we hear Angel Olsen fume with hatred over a lover who will tell his or her friends that she was wrong about something. Halfway through, the song then erupts into some kind of betrayal, lyrically speaking. Olsen mocks the supposed wisdom of a former lover by repeating the refrain “Don’t you know?” with devastating impact. The song then descends deeply into outright denial as Olsen claims she never really lost anyone in that failed relationship.
With the exception of “Summer”, the rest of the album is slow and sprawling. “Tonight” is a deeply moving realization that she’d rather be alone than be in a relationship. This tender song begins gently with strings, and listening to it makes me feel like I’m slowly waking up to somebody making a sobbing confession at my bedside. The strings are gorgeous in a minimalist way, like something Max Richter has composed. Olsen undersings for most of the song and allows it to sound fragile.
In “Summer”, we return to some acoustic guitar seldom used on this album. It is the only song that harks back to Angel Olsen’s earlier days, such as the Burn Your Fire For No Witness era, with her more traditional indie rock instrumentation. It sounds a bit like a country song mixed with synth pop laid with some, again, dreamy vocals. Near the end of the song, Olsen sings about depression in the midst of beautiful summer days:
And all those summer days were like a dream
Woke me from a restless sleep
Made me quiet, had me weak
And all the weight of all the world came rushing through
The last line, sung a capella, hits especially hard and shows off Olsen’s great talent as a songwriter, willing to use some hyperbole to create melodrama.
“Endgame” is a long, sprawling track that begins to feel like an old jazz song halfway through as cymbals are brushed over. Olsen sounds emotionally defeated in the beginning but then sounds proud in her admission that she doesn’t know how to speak to a lover and would rather be alone. Near the end of the song, Olsen creates a fantastic effect with her vocals by double tracking them in a special way. She sings softly on one track while singing loudly on the other. The two combined make her singing both intimate and distant at the same time. It sounds like she is both whispering in your ear and singing to you from far away as if in a memory. A lone trumpet follows this grand proclamation for her own solitude in a kind of musical echo to the lyrics.
Olsen closes the album with “Chance”, a song reminiscent of 1950s doo wop. She sings about the chance to fall in love with a stranger across the room. Olsen repeats the lines “with all of your heart” in such a way that she allows the strings to overpower her voice in a melodramatic rush of emotion at the end of the song. She encourages listeners to be more present with each other rather than wondering how long a relationship could last with the lines:
It’s hard to say forever love
Forever’s just so far
Why don’t you say you’re with me now
With all of your heart?
With all of your heart?
With all of your heart?
It’s a deeply moving way to end the album: to have hope for the next thing in life by being emotionally present with others.
As a whole, Angel Olsen along with Ben Babbitt and Jherek Bischoff created a modern, lush orchestral reimagining of a gothic/synth pop album with influences spanning several decades. The sound is bold and sweeping and signifies Angel Olsen’s continual rebirth as an artist. If you liked the chamber pop of Weyes Blood’s 2019 album Titanic Rising or the orchestral arrangements of Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, you may like this album, too.
Angel Olsen has described All Mirrors as being about “losing empathy, trust, love for destructive people. It is about walking away from the noise and realizing that you can have solitude and peace in your own thoughts, alone, without anyone to know it or validate it. In every way — from the making of it, to the words, to how I feel moving forward, this record is about owning up to your darkest side, finding the capacity for new love and trusting change even when you feel like a stranger.”
In that sense, lyrically speaking, it’s a record that reaffirms a person’s decision for solitude and peace on their own terms. Is it too cheesy to recommend this album to people dealing with heartbreak? Maybe, but I recommend it to everyone as I cannot think of a more moving and strangely beautiful album in recent years than this one.
