Big Time

Big Time is a rich, uplifting album that shakes off sorrow, having stared it squarely in the face.

The album as a whole is a strong argument for Olsen being her generation’s finest songwriter.

Big Time is a monumental work on loss and how quickly things can change. We see Olsen come into a new power as a songwriter, resulting in an album filled to the brim with radiance and conviction.

Big Time is really a remarkable and intimate display of growth on the part of the woman who made it, thread-bare and unashamed, competing with the new Kendrick Lamar album for new heights of self-flagellation, and glorious self affirmation; made all the more intense of course by that voice of Olsen’s, masculine and feminine at the same time, and frankly criminal wield with material this naked and bare.

Haunting, heartbreaking and life-affirming, Angel Olsen’s songwriting talents soar to great heights in the mostly restrained palette here, offering the much needed space to wrestle with the complexities life has thrown at her.

Superb. ... “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, Calif., with the producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous current of weighty, transformative and bracingly cleareyed emotion.

It’s a record that’s testament to going through hell and coming out the other side. It’s also an album that confirms Angel Olsen as one of the foremost singer-songwriters of her generation.

Big Time is emotionally devastating, but never toes a line of melodrama.

While her last proper album, 2019’s orchestrally-imbued All Mirrors, was something of a coming out party for her grand artistic ambition and scope, Big Time is the coming out party for her true personality. In order to do this, she’s stripped away the grandiosity and reverted back to the country and Americana sounds that she calls home.

Big Time might be the most direct view into Olsen — at least in the context of a full band. It’s a masterful, emotional body of work ready to fit any mood, and it’s yet another successful sea change for one of indie music’s most consistent artists.

Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease.

As several of her songs attest, music can be consolation in the most troubled times, and Big Time is a silky balm.

'Big Time' is a focused record that contains stunning examples of vulnerability, almost too exposed to watch. Her ability to shed layers artistically and emotionally, over and over, leaves you excited to see where her next destination may be.

Rather than offering something for everyone, Big Time wrangles complex, overwhelming emotions with a broad palette that's commanded by its lyrics and tormented vocal performances.

Just as on her recent EP of ’80s cover songs, ‘Aisles’, Olsen approached the decade’s tropes with care, and at no point does ‘Big Time’ descend into parody. Though it uses them in the same way those aforementioned greats did, to access the deep and real emotion at a song’s core and open it up to her listener as something irresistible.

While the set’s melodies are not pronouncedly hook-driven, they are indeed entrancing due primarily to Olsen’s consistently sensual tone and precise phrasing.

Big Time doesn't feel like a definitive transformation - it's still tender and unfurled in places - but it does have a new clarity, a sense of masks peeling away, veils dropped. [Jul 2022, p.84]

The country-tinged beauty of this album is a revelation after the grand, gloomy orchestration she summoned for 2019’s All Mirrors and stripped away for 2020’s Whole New Mess, and a rewarding payoff for fans who’ve always known she had a record like this in her.

Her sixth, co-produced by Jonathan Wilson, executes no radical stylistic swerve but neither are its 10 songs of a single type. Rather, they’re a balancing of country – here are echoes of Tammy, Emmylou and Lee Hazlewood – and torch song (kd lang, Roy Orbison), with the odd flourish of cocktail-lounge melancholy (a la Badalamenti) and classic, MGM-style orchestrations. [Jul 2022, p.28]

The new record finds Olsen basking in new love and lost love, using her distinctive tone and quavering vibrato to great effect. Olsen leans country on Big Time, moving between lush slide guitars and piano ballads, singing of grief with a gentleness that exudes as much gratefulness as it does melancholy.

This is a significantly more rustic album than All Mirrors, with major country and folk influences joining that album’s lush art pop sound. Even the songs which lean towards the latter style are often gentle and delicate. It’s also a record which feels infinitely more personal.