Still Intensity: Angel Olsen at 9:30 Club

Angel Olsen’s records are often intimate, immediate affairs. Even on her most recent album, My Woman, with its echoes of Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks, its guitar solos and synths, her immense voice cuts through, grabs you and holds you – alternately violent and cradling.

That being said, nothing compares to the experience of seeing her live. Her voice can fill a room without a microphone, and it somehow reverberates off of every surface. It’s not only an aural sensation – it’s an imposingly physical one as well. But it’s her stage presence that truly separates the live performances from the records.

Skilled painters are able to achieve an effect when painting faces where the eyes of their subjects seem to follow the viewer regardless of vantage point. This eye-tracking illusion is eerie, intimate, unsettling and most of all, commanding. Last night at 9:30 Club, Angel Olsen was somehow able to accomplish this effect with her voice. Regardless of where she was looking and what she was singing, it was as if she was looking and singing directly at you, or more accurately, directly through you.

Take “Acrobat,” for instance. The opening track from 2012’s Half Way Home, already foreboding, was slowed down and stretched with sizzling drums and droning guitars, turning the track into some kind of apocalyptic waltz heard darkly, almost submerged underwater. The crowd was silent, entranced, hanging on every syllable, when, during one of the carefully weighted silences peppered throughout the song, Olsen popped a smirk. She held it, surveying the crowd as if she wouldn’t continue until we were all ready, then gently intoned, “I thought that I died.” The power of the line, accented by the knowing smirk, sent a palpable shiver through the room.

The louder moments of the concert inspired shivers as well. Olsen and her band, who are as tight as they come, don’t move around very much. The performance is strikingly still, especially when compared to the excellent opening act, Alex Cameron, who strutted and danced across the stage. This stillness combined with the burning drive of “Forgiven/Forgotten,” the melodrama of “Shut Up Kiss Me” and the slow build on “Sister,” which after the mantra-esque chant of “All my life I thought I’d change” explodes into a guitar solo, lends the performance a kind of stirring power, an inward potential energy simultaneously repressed and expressed. The contrast builds what you might call a density of power, a thickness – sounds that might otherwise be diffuse all swirling around the singular, still, magnetic force of Olsen and her band.

This performance marked Angel Olsen’s first appearance at 9:30 Club, and it was nothing short of a triumph. I’ve never seen a crowd so transfixed, so silent, so willing to live and die by each siren like stroke of her falsetto or operatic quiver of her lower register. The show ended with an encore of “Intern” and “Woman,” both off the new album, and both vastly different songs musically and emotionally.

What makes Olsen such an incredible live act is that she approaches both her music and her performance with an actor’s intensity and commitment to craft. Regardless of the track, regardless of the mood, she fully inhabits each song. The audience can’t help but listen in wonder and awe.

Learn more about Angel Olsen at www.angelolsen.com.

Photo: Amanda Marsalis