Double Review! Northumberland Hussar Pub & Angel Olsen: Burn Your Fire For No Witness

I recently had a lovely evening out with my friend, noise musician, Dominic Dixon to the Northumberland Hussar for food and then to my first gig in a long long time!  

The Northumberland Hussar is offers a really good choice of pub grub including and array of amazing sounding pizzas and burgers and a really good selection for vegetarians which is really unusual for a pub. I had a pizza with egg, spinach, mozzerella and mushrooms. Dom had a falafel burger with chunky chips on the side. Everything was delicious and I was really please with the prices too. The staff were also friendly and I loved the ethos of this pub. It is not part of a chain and claims to never want to be. I just felt like I would really want to support this place in the future and go back as often as I can. I would so much rather go to an independent establishment than support the likes of Wetherspoons or Lloyds.
 

Pizza from Northumberland Hussar

Now for the gig...
 

The support act was Rodrigo Amarante who offered up a kind of sleepy lullaby music that you might fall adrift to, the perfect intro to Angel Olsen who bursts on stage and goes straight into a lively opening song. It’s a bit like eating a massive Sunday dinner, falling asleep in front of a blazing fire and then jumping out into biting winter cold air for a blustery bicycle ride.

 

Angel Olsen embodies the essence of a romantic burning soulful singer. She is sometimes so intensely looking at a faraway point that I feel like I might burst out laughing with the seriousness of it all. I guess Angel feels the same way herself as she sings,”I heard my mother thinking me right back into my birth/ I laughed so loud inside myself it all began to hurt” from ‘White Fire’

Angel’s music, lyrics and sound are spell bindingly poetic but quietly controlled, reminding me of a young Cat Power. He leaves me feeling like a heartbroken teen busily scratching away mine and his initials on the front of my dog eared math book. Angel sings with defiance and it is refreshing to see a strong woman who shows her weaknesses so freely, her voice often rising from a whimsy whisper to a stark shout.

One of the stand out songs was an interpretation of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” which Angel sang with rawness and vulnerability that only someone who has been through such loss and heartbreak can re-imagine with any authenticity