When Angel Olsen runs out of space in a notebook, she doesn’t immediately buy a fresh pad; instead, she crams her latest thoughts next to her old grocery lists in the middle. It feels like less pressure to begin in media res—somewhere between the milk and the onions—than to start with a “hello, it’s me again.”
For Olsen, another album is a fresh notepad; an EP a transitional phase tucked in the margins. Since the release of her debut album in 2012, Olsen has found various ways to ease the stakes between major releases, popping her head back in without having to reintroduce herself entirely. In 2017, that took the form of Phases, a 12-track catalog of discarded songs and covers; in 2021, Aisles, a wilfully frivolous bunch of ’80s covers. With her latest album, 2022’s Big Time, in the rearview (alongside its companion EP, 2023’s Forever Means), we now have another Olsen interregnum: Cosmic Waves Volume 1, her debut compilation series. It features two halves: Side A, a selection of original songs from a range of under-the-radar artists, as curated by Olsen; Side B, Olsen’s own take on a song from each of the featured artists.
Cosmic Waves is a bolder experiment than any of her previous interstitial releases, though it’s consistent with Olsen’s career-long fascination with the act of interpretation. In Olsen’s music, love is a constant act of projection and analysis—so when the love fades, so too does the ability to read the other. “Now it’s impossible to conceive/I don’t know who can see you,” she sang on Big Time’s opening song. Cosmic Waves is, too, an act of love, reinterpreting the very act of reinterpretation. Since the project is organized around promoting lesser-known artists, its cover songs become a medium not of association but of loving introduction.
However, with Olsen’s name hanging over the compilation, it’s a struggle to hear each artist on their own terms, and the act of comparison inevitably creeps in. It’s almost irresistible not to hear each of the songs on Side A filtered through an Olsen-like rubric: In Poppy Jean Crawford, there’s Olsen’s barreling cadence and winsome vocalizations; in Coffin Prick, the prismatic light show of Olsen’s synthier moments. These two bombastic tracks are sharply followed by three slow, twilit ballads, and listening to them together feels like eating a chocolate cookie where all the chunks are lumped together on one side. But if any of the tracks demand to stand out on its own, it’s the heavy-lidded romance of Sarah Grace White’s “Ride,” a song of spartan yet swoonsome melodies that cast a contrast against the busy arrangements of the other songs. Among the artists, White comes closest to Olsen’s singularity, though that’s exactly what Olsen tries to conceal in the second half.
Throughout the covers, Olsen’s voice is an instrument consistently detached from her own body. It sounds as though it didn’t come from her throat, but from a little lamp in the room: a small flicker. On “The Takeover” she sings in an archly beautiful style, leaning into a light-headed voice and seldom landing on the plosive consonants that would make the delivery recognizably Olsen. If anything’s identifiably Olsen in these songs, it’s how she appears to be mimicking the recording techniques of her earliest releases: the kelpy reverb, the skittish strums of her simple guitar chords, the overall indirectness. There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing. On “Sinkhole,” she sings in a register halfway back to herself—but just when you think she’s about to land on an Olsenism, she goes back skyward into sweet impersonality. For now, Olsen is still hovering somewhere above or between, yet to add “notepad” to her grocery list.
