Angel Olsen doesn't pull any punches in her live show, and she insists that she will be heard. In addition to her own impressive, show-stopping vocals, her band included two strings (cello and violin) to give the songs a symphonic, at times almost post-rock sound, and she totally transformed the Variety Playhouse stage to look like a parlor from some decadent Victorian mansion. I'm impressed.
Let's take a step back for a moment. The opener was a band called Vagabon, whom I had not heard of before but the audience seemed to be familiar with, based on the applause to the opening notes of certain songs and the enthusiastic cheers at the end of others. Frankly, I didn't care for them much - their brand of indie folk wasn't particularly interesting to me. Their playing was proficient enough but they seemed to be more about the lyrical content rather than the sound of the songs, and I didn't already know the words and either couldn't always make them out or else lost interest due to their slow delivery. If I knew them better I might have liked them more, but as it was I endured more than enjoyed their 45-minute opening set.
Angel and her band took the stage at about 9:30. Variety Playhouse was packed, and seating in the theater seats was by reservation only. They were turning people away from the SRO area in front of the stage before Angel even started her set, and the side risers (from where I like to watch) and the balcony were packed. I even got evicted from my usual spot on the first riser on the right when someone in a wheelchair showed up and I had to watch the show from somewhere in the middle of the riser. Fortunately for me, my line of sight was still unblocked and of course you can hear fine anywhere in the theater.
Angel opened her set with songs from her impressive new album, All Mirrors, and she surprised me by singing the title song, one of her all-time best and clearly one of the best songs of 2019, as the second song in the set, rather than as the finale as I would have expected.
Fun fact: I don't know what the weird, semi-beehive hair style she wears in the video is called, but she also wore her hair that way during last night's show. Cool.
What was somewhat surprising, though, is how refreshingly normal and, well, fun Angel seemed on stage. Based on her performance in the All Mirrors video, with its gowns and headdresses and all, it's easy to assume she's some sort of ultra-serious, pretentious diva, but she came across last night as very down-to-earth and friendly. She laughed on stage, a lot, even having to stop the first song of her set due to her laughter when she realized during the first stanza that she was singing in a different key than the rest of the band. She laughed while talking to members of the audience during her stage banter between numbers, and she laughed to the response she got during some of her songs. She even invited a young woman up on stage to sing along with her during one song, ceding the mic to her for one stanza. She was, in short, cool, and not some pompous, over-privileged diva.
Musically, her set covered a large range of styles. She played many of the somber, almost dirge-like, meditative numbers from All Mirrors. Some of those pieces floated for a while in their own dreamy atmosphere, while others would build up into loud, climatic crescendos. She played some of the poppier songs from her previous album, My Woman, such as Shut Up and Kiss Me. Some songs had a country twang and some didn't, and she even played a few folky numbers alone on stage with just her guitar.
We've been fans of Angel for years now. We saw her at The Earl back in 2014 and later, as her reputation grew, at Terminal West in 2016. She played some songs last night from both of those periods, albeit retrofitted to accommodate her orchestral band for this tour. It was a tour de force performance, and Angel seems intent not just to merely entertain, but to evoke awe from the audience.
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