Angel Olsen: Phases – your indie kid sister’s Christmas gift, sorted

Fetch your flippers, because we're going on a deep dive into Phases, Angel Olsen's collection of B-sides, demos and a number of brand new tracks from the last seven years of her career.

Piecing together Olsen's progress as an artist is part and parcel with Phases, as you hear her sound graduate and develop from the lo-fi bedroom recordings of How Many Disasters and Sans to the well-oiled and never-released Special, which she recorded during studio sessions for last year's My Woman. Her voice goes from a whisper to a roar, building in emotive and creative strength as time goes by.

The hardcore Angel Olsen fan might already be wise to the ways of this compilation, with bonus tracks from 2014's Burn Your Fire for No Witness featuring heavily and familiar B-sides such as Sweet Dreams and California that accompanied her 2013 single Sleepwalker making up the track list; but, as collectors editions go, well, it might be the perfect gift for the indie aficionado in your life, neatly placing stray mp3s together in a busy iTunes account. Christmas is just around the corner after all.

[ angelolsen.com ]