Music Review: "My Woman"

In the photoshoots promoting her new album, Angel Olsen reportedly gave one directive to her publicists: no trees.

For an artist whose name is typically accompanied by words like “earthy” and “folksy,” distancing herself from nature, like many of the aesthetic choices of “My Woman,” is emblematic of a transformation in Olsen’s career.

However, to toss off “My Woman” as merely a coming-out party would be to minimize both the depth of its emotional core and its continuity with her previous work. The changes are many, but “My Woman” is more a refinement of Olsen’s style than a reinvention of it.

Indeed, the differences between “My Woman” and 2014’s “Burn Your Fire for No Witness”—excellent in its own right—are striking on the surface, embodied most obviously in the two lead singles from “My Woman” that were released this summer. In “Intern,” Olsen dons a tinsel wig. In "Shut Up Kiss Me", she asks ironically if she needed to “give more attitude.” She pared back the layers of reverb on her guitar or traded it in for (gasp!) a synthesizer. For her newest effort, the Strokes-esque filter that often masked her voice has been lifted, its distinct warble all but ironed out into an earnest wail that would make Grace Slick proud.

Olsen sequences the five more upbeat, single-ready tracks on the front half of the record, followed by the more slow-burning cuts of the B-side. “Burn Your Fire for No Witness” employed a similar structure, but where the 2014 album threatened to lose momentum during the final two or three tracks, “My Woman” capitalizes on the energy established early on, taking the urgency of songs like “Shut Up Kiss Me” and “Give It Up” and breaking them down in a crushing denouement capped by the seven-plus-minute jams “Sister” and “Woman.”

Many of the lyrical themes that marked Olsen’s previous work are also present here, but the tone is more clear-eyed and confrontational, the expressions of loneliness more mature and the end result more hopeful. She sings familiar sentiments of desperation in relationships (“Give It Up”), men who see the women they profess to love as interchangeable (“Heart Shaped Face”) and nostalgia for a love lost (“Those Were the Days,” a highlight that brings out a jazz vibe only hinted at previously). The almost-title track, “Woman,” functions as the album’s mission statement, riding a tight bass line amid waves of haunting synthesizers, and it contains the most powerful line on the album, its desperation increasing with each repetition: “I dare you to understand me what makes me a woman.”

Here, the “woman” of “My Woman” could be Olsen herself or a statement of belonging and identity for womanhood at large. “My Woman” is Olsen taking control of her image, her body, her art, and her life, staring boldly into heartache, fear and oppression and attempting to reckon with it. It is a statement to the male critics and radio show hosts who dismissed her as a “girl at the bottom of a dark well” and confined her to the trees. It is assertive and defiantly feminine—the title is officially stylized in all caps—in a year where femininity can subject you to more scrutiny than being an outspoken bigot. It is an improvement on her already stellar craft and a timely message from an artist who has cemented her place as one of rock’s most powerful voices, showing she is no one’s woman but her own.