Angel Olsen’s third album is immediately and enormously enjoyable, but also one that might take a long time to fully absorb. Its 10 songs are by turns beautiful, sad, funny, silly, obvious and oblique; relatively compact and rockily upbeat in the album’s first half, but gradually exploring more expansive, torch-song territory in its second. The most instant pleasures come from the fact that this is just a gorgeous-sounding record – the melodies are exquisite, the production airily pristine, and Olsen’s singing often supernaturally beautiful. Never Be Mine is a swooning desert lullaby; Shut Up Kiss Me a brilliant, theatrical burst of faintly comic drama; Those Were the Days a whispered, vibrato-drenched dream. But there’s also a needling sense of complication, of necessary tension, in every riff and every line; this feels like a record that contains a great deal to pore over.
