“Sad and angry women” is the first playlist that comes up if you search for Angel Olsen’s music on Spotify. True, she started out as the 21st-century psych-folk scene’s answer to Edith Piaf, triumphing in tormented love. “Don’t you know you’re wanted in 50 states?/ I love you, dear, but it’s not up to me,” she sang on her 2012 debut. But her sixth album, Big Time, is a thoroughly blissed-out affair, rocking gently in the warm breezes of vintage country.
Think: yawning electric sitar and cat-stretches of pedal steel; slow blooming horns and bar-room pianos, with notes settling like sunlit dust motes. Think: swoony romantic tunes that run their fingers through memories of late-Sixties Elvis and Scott Walker. Her odd half-yodel winks sleepily back to the lipstick ghosts of Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells, as she sings: “Forget the old dreams, I got a new thing…”
