Olsen can’t decide whether she wants to make peace with the world or set it alight, and it is her constant grappling with that dilemma that makes the record such an engaging listen.
Olsen shares graciously in her music, and if you are willing, Burn a Fire for No Witness will change your world. Or, actually, it will change how you see your world.
Billed as “a collection of songs grown in a year of heartbreak, travel, and transformation,” Olsen’s sophomore LP is an astonishingly graceful, open, and engaging offering filled with intimate and unflinching songs.
Its title is a biblically bold declaration accompanied by 11 songs that put the 27-year-old’s worldview in no uncertain terms: disinterested in the attentions of others and steadfastly committed to honouring her own intentions and experience.
Burn Your Fire, through increased complexity of instrumentation, creates a new dynamic - the vocal is more understated and reserved, less elusive and divergent - it's autonomy partially tethered by the whole ensembles balanced interrelation.
Olsen is a unique songwriter of incredible complexity and fearlessness, and despite her ostensibly considerable inner sorrow, she manages to deliver an album that is as equally exultant as it is despondent.
Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.
There’s an inherent risk in a voice as powerful as Olsen’s. It’s a winning hand other singer-songwriters could easily overplay, pushing every song to histrionics, but even on an album as brash as Burn Your Fire, Olsen knows when to pull back.
Those more aggressive tendencies are featured more prominently alongside Olsen's breathy vocals on Olsen's follow-up, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, which is noisier, brasher, and more confident than its languid predecessor.
Burn Your Fire for No Witness proves a bolder, more assertive expression of the Missouri-born songwriter’s talents
Her rickety coo is more flawless than ever, her songwriting is defiantly more eclectic than it was throughout the acoustic porch songs of ‘Half Way Home’.
Angel Olsen's second album marries solo singer-songwriter stuff with buzzy, fuzzy alt-pop – alternating between one and the other so expertly that the strengths of both are highlighted, the weaknesses pushed deep into the background.
Burn Your Fire for No Witness feels like a big step forward from its predecessor, Half Way Home.
This superb second album makes a ... dramatic leap forward – vaulting straight from evident promise to its stringent and unarguable realisation.
Like her debut, Burn Your Fire For No Witness often feels stripped back, designed to showcase her phenomenal, fluid, can-do-anything vocals. But here the production is kicked up a few notches.
There is a lot of heartbreak on Burn Your Fire For No Witness, as well as a lot of pleasing anachronism; a lot of hard-won resignation and what you might call stern vulnerability, a quality that Olsen shares with Joni Mitchell without sounding at all like Mitchell.
These 11 tracks still feel like soliloquies. Born out of a year of ‘heartbreak, travel and transformation’, they are straight-to-the-knife-point meditations on love, pain and existence caught in the raw spotlight of aloneness.
Whether through its most aching moments or the psych-styled Americana explored on "High & Wild" and "Lights Out," there's plenty of high-calibre hypnotism to take hold of you on Burn Your Fire For No Witness.
In its apparent desperate seeking of recognition, the album definitely manages to stand out in a crowd, but it doesn't always like what it sees.
Burn Your Fire feels like Olsen's tentative "fuck you" to those who would dismiss her as just another voice, tossing aside the bushel and letting the compositional light shine as brightly as the vocal.
More than anything, however, the heightened production and instrumentation just help to show how much Olsen's songs have grown and how confident she's become as a performer, even in the space of one album.
In this entangled series of ideas about emotions and expression, about the past and its grip on us, the truly remarkable thing about Burn Your Fire For No Witness is how it questions the very nature of sad songs.
Like a good drama, the most enthralling moments of Burn Your Fire occur in the most unpolished and ambiguous facets. Each song is familiar at first listen, only to transform into intricately indelible settings the more you follow their path.
In spite of its gloomier mood, it’s a record every bit as spirited as Half Way Home, and possibly even more affecting.
For as commanding and affecting Burn Your Fire for No Witness can be while it plays, the album remains elusive when trying to call it to mind later.
For those prepared to hunker down and get immersed in Angel Olsen’s laconic, often downbeat echoes on depressing life events many of us have experienced, it’s a startlingly uncompromising, if occasionally uncomfortable peek into her haunted dreams.
Burn Your Fire does not break the indie-rock mold, but it is exciting to hear Olsen working outside of her comfort zone.
Unyielding and stalwart in its devotion to the verities of confessional, folk-tinged balladry, No Witness is a difficult album to play unless you're ready to accept Olsen's self-questioning pinpricks.
Lyrically, she has never been better, with moments of sarcasm even shining through her often painfully honest musings. Yet it’s Olsen’s willingness to develop her sound that is really the most gratifying aspect of Burn Your Fire For No Witness
Burn Your Fire for No Witness deflects Olsen's intensities with humor and her humor with an intimate mysticism. It's a balanced album by a spirit who seems anything but.
In 2011 we met Angel Olsen, one of Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy's protected artists, with the excellent "Wolfroy Goes To Town". Her versatile and timeless voice was instantly remarkable on this very refined record. It didn't take long for the Angel to learn to fly on her own and leave her mentor's cozy nest: she offered us her first solo work the following year.
"Half Way Home" was a great album for any neo-country-folk fan, regulars of the Prince's clique. The songs ... read more
Unfucktheworld - 4/5
Forgiven/Forgotten - 4/5
Hi-Five - 3/5
White Fire - 4/5
High & Wild - 4/5
Lights Out - 4/5
Stars - 4/5
Iota - 4/5
Dance Slow Decades - 3/5
Enemy - 3/5
Windows - 4/5
Angel Olsen sings with a certain comforting vulnerability. So rich, and so raw. I am only beginning to feel.
1 | Unfucktheworld 2:05 | 85 |
2 | Forgiven/Forgotten 2:03 | 86 |
3 | Hi-Five 2:57 | 84 |
4 | White Fire 6:55 | 86 |
5 | High & Wild 3:53 | 80 |
6 | Lights Out 4:27 | 86 |
7 | Stars 4:38 | 83 |
8 | Iota 3:27 | 82 |
9 | Dance Slow Decades 4:05 | 80 |
10 | Enemy 5:43 | 77 |
11 | Windows 4:07 | 84 |
#1 | / | A.V. Club |
#2 | / | Amazon |
#2 | / | Flavorwire |
#3 | / | Consequence of Sound |
#3 | / | Time Out New York |
#4 | / | Vulture |
#5 | / | Stereogum |
#5 | / | The Skinny |
#5 | / | Under the Radar |
#6 | / | Rough Trade |