Ariel Bitran

Her voice aches like a memory.

In her video for "Sweet Dreams", Angel Olsen pays tribute to the mournful passages of psychedelia, with colors and sounds swimming upwards and sideways like technicolor beads of oils, reds, blues, and purples, across a projection screen. Flashing colors and photographs in this video make you yearn for something more, a girl, the lake, or an angel. Something old, something new, something you do no not have, maybe something only attainable through the malleability of perception.

While the initial bass line steers the song dangerously close to The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", a re-harmonization through different guitar chords gives it some leeway, and the high-note stretch in the chorus is eerily reminiscent of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game", but again, the superimposed chord-progression which redefines the melody differentiates the song from any other. Maybe Olsen is derivative in her composition choices, but everybody steals.

The strength in this song lies within her confident yet subtle and melodically driven vocal variations and the seductively vague bridge that howls, "The time will come for everyone, for everyone to go!" The modern musical references disappear in the larger context of her song, which places you laying on your back beneath the California redwoods leaves swaying in the wind. Your mind grasps and slips eternally clutching at the hands of time then drips away like colored oils on a sheet of wax.

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