When Lorde released “Green Light” as a lead single and music video for Melodrama in early 2017, the zeitgeist surrounding it was not merely due to her widely felt absence the year prior. Rather, Lorde announced her return to the spotlight in the form of a cry of perseverance after a breakup, composed equally of grief, joy, and excitement. It featured all the hallmarks of a classic music video - plenty of singing at smoky clubs, running through the streets at night, and even Jack Antonoff banging on a piano in the middle of a bathroom. The energy and happiness with which Lorde told us that she couldn’t let go could not have been more relatable and validating, and it fared even better as the opening track of an album full of much less hopeful songs.
“Lark”, the opening track of Angel Olsnen’s All Mirrors, serves as an anti-“Green Light”, retaining its universality but swapping out its relative cheerfulness and relief with reservation. In its music video, instead of rushing out into the street from the club, Olsen is shown grieving at home, fantasizing about running through the wilderness, sinking to the bottom of a lake and swimming up to safety, sitting beside a bonfire at night, hitchhiking on the back of a truck through a city, and winding up alone on a beach. Where “Green Light” is the relieved expression of a completed chapter, “Lark” shows the tiredness of looking but never finding an answer. “To forget you is to hide, there’s still so much left to recover”, Olsen begins, as the swarming twelve-piece string orchestra which adorns most of the album begins the swirling chord progression underneath her voice. And in this manner, the album progresses as a look at grief over time, its unfinishedness, and the way we project it on ourselves and each other. To compliment the message of these songs, Olsen wraps them in her most layered, complex production yet, which makes for an album as accessible as it is personal.
While Angel Olsen’s highly successful 2016 opus My Woman gave us a taste of her abilities in crafting maximalist chamber pop songs, those songs only took up space on half of the album (the other half being full of catchy, uptempo garage pop songs). For All Mirrors, she decided to fully stretch out into several idioms of pop’s past, with glints of peak Electric Light Orchestra, touches of New Order’s post-punk, and post-Britpop acts like Mahogany shining through nearly 50 minutes of beautiful string arrangements and slow-burning ballads. Using all of her (clearly deep) musical acumen, Olsen effortlessly creates moments of drama in all of her songs – the creaking instrumentals on “Tonight” and “Impasse” remind a listener of Radiohead in “How to Disappear Completely” mode, and the circling string figure introduced halfway into the title track sounds like a minor-key version of Stereolab’s “Cybele’s Reverie” – reflecting the ups and downs, the cyclical catastrophe and calm of trying to forget a person.
The lyrics of All Mirrors touch on the nuance of this in a remarkably complete way. The title track discusses how far we might have to come to still just be the same person, with the same issues, grieving over the same person. “What It Is” touches on trying to figure out if we’ve moved on enough to be with someone new, to feel something as good as an old love. By the time we reach the acceptance, the this-never-would-have-worked of “Endgame”, our ears are directed to lead our hearts. Underneath the 60’s country-western gloss emerges the Pet Sounds thump-THUMP baseline, with carries into the next song through the album’s end. If “Lark” gave us the exhaustion of rushing toward acceptance, the bass line of “Chance” gives us the closest thing we will get to a deep breath – a train pulling out, the agitated bark of dogs, the fading ring of faraway bells.
Listen to All Mirrors on Spotify:
