Big Time (studio album) by Angel Olsen

“Big Time” takes on a sparser version of the Nashville sound. The strings will spread out over quiet pianos or guitar and linger. The centerpiece of the sound is always Olsen’s voice. The instrumentation is perfectly suited to her voice. She uses the space to pull out such sorrow from her voice. The little whines and the slow delivery can be heart-breaking. On tracks like “This Is How It Works” or “Go Home”, she warbles her voice with the music for especially emotional climaxes. The downside of the project is the similarity. The structure and instrumentation are fundamental, unchanged across the whole album. The familiarity can make waiting to get to those special endings a bit plain. A light journey but a worthy destination.

Album Rating: 72.00
(720/10)

1.All The Good Times. 76
2.Big Time. 70
3.Dream Thing. 69
4.Ghost On. 71
5.All The Flowers. 72
6.Right Now. 74
7.This Is How It Works. 74
8.Go Home. 80
9.Through The Fires. 65
10.Chasing The Sun. 68

From Brad1770 11/05/2022 01:05

AO comes through a tumultuous period in her personal life where she lost both her parents, came out, had her first queer relationship, had her first queer break up eventually finding true love with a trans partner with it all laid bare on her best album since ‘Burn Your Fire for No Witness’. Heartfelt, powerful and confessional ‘Big Time’ is an essential album for 22

From HoldenM 09/10/2022 01:58

An album whose most gripping moments are its quietest, where Olsen lets us luxuriate in vast sonic spaces, isolating us from everything. While I wish there were a couple big standouts (an "Enemy," a "Shut Up Kiss Me," an "All Mirrors" or two), this is an immaculate work of songwriting and production, beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

From Arthurknight 08/02/2022 06:35

This is a perfectly okay album, but Olsen has lost any x-factor I thought she once had. I'd rather listen to 70s country classics than this project – because that's literally what this album is emulating, just with gay themes and ill-fittingly clean production. Olsen is able to make the genre shift work, only the end-product isn't especially impressive; it's a facile project in that nothing new to the genre is offered expect for the fact Angel Olsen is doing it. Go Home is an oasis in the tracklisting where the sound is very signature Angel Olsen but with just a twist of country – this should have been pursued more and on more fleshed out songs. Lastly, mixing is too quiet here, and we really miss out on some much needed crescendo moments.

A slow and gentle record of songs about grief, love and healing that delves more into a Nashville country sound than any of Olsen's previous efforts.

From cestuneblague 06/13/2022 00:30

Solid, but wears thin after awhile