Last fall, we mentioned Angel Olsen’s 6-track debut, Strange Cacti, after seeing her perform on tour with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and as the frontwoman to Will Oldham’s new Kevin Coyne/Dagmar Krause cover band, The Babblers. Well, anyone who either missed out on the first two sold-out editions of the set — or if you’d simply prefer vinyl to the relatively lo-fi cassette format — will be pleased to hear that Bathetic Records are releasing the album as a 12-inch record this March.
“I was pretty deathly sick over the time Jon Hency and I started talking about doing a tape release on Bathetic and I had completely lost my voice,” Olsen wrote in a blog post, adding that while waiting for her voice to return, she listened to the “Chi-lites ‘coldest days of my life’, a lot of Persian and Turkish psych folk, (Yahgmaie, Selda Bagcan mostly) some Amalia Rodrigues, Timi Yuro, and Helen Shapiro.”
So that explains the ’60s vocal influences I’ve been hearing on Strange Cacti’s gorgeous “Creator, Destroyer” and “Some Things Cosmic” cuts (though I was slightly off, having had Johnnie Ray in mind). Stay tuned here for order info, check out a recent interview with Olsen here, and enjoy two outdoor live takes above.