Live music review: Angel Olsen at Cork Opera House

3 stars

Angel Olsen’s trajectory since 2012’s Half Way Home has been steady and assured, your word-of-mouth new favourite act. My Woman, one of the standout albums of last year, saw her star continue to rise, this newspaper recently dubbing her the “indie heroine we desperately need”.

And now we find her onstage at Cork Opera House, the night after playing to a packed Vicar Street, the next steps on her inevitable road to festival headliner.

She oozes cool as she follows her five-piece band — all clad in baby-blue suits; a uniformed act always a welcome sight — onstage for ‘Heart Shaped Face’, an impossibly slow opener. She shields her eyes from the lights for half the track, later seeking them to be turned down.

After asking “Are you lonely too?” on ‘Hi-Five’, she tells the seated and hushed crowd that it feels like we’re on a date but that it’s very one-sided so far. It also feels slightly awkward — there’s a distinct lack of energy in the room that seems to feed through to the band.

Rather than rise to the occasion/challenge, though, seems to shirk it. ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’ should be three minutes of rollicking joy, but instead it simply plods along. ‘Sister’ should make everyone in the audience swoon but it meanders and just leads to slouching. The band, meanwhile, sound more country’n’roll than they do on record.

“It feels like we’re on a TV show up here,” says Olsen midway through her set. “I guess in some ways we are.”

[media-youtube]https://youtu.be/nleRCBhLr3k[/media]

It’s a frustrating show, despite her obvious talents — Olsen’s voice, for one; she Joplins her way through the 85-minute set. The first song of a long encore, ‘Unfucktheworld’, sees her return to the stage solo, just her and her guitar, singing: “I am the only one now.”It’s easily the highlight of the night.

She showcases her folk-singer roots for closing song ‘The Waiting’, a woozy reminder of her early charms. Because we have such high hopes and expectations of Angel Olsen, it’s hard not to feel disappointment that the show is humdrum when it should be searing. One expects, though, that it’s only a minor blip on the way to superstardom.