Artist: Angel Olsen
Album: Burn Your Fire For No Witness
Genre: Folk Rock
Label: Jagjaguwar

Out of all the world’s inevitabilities, loneliness and fear are the two we know at birth. Perhaps that’s because they require the most of our heart. They teach our body how to expand its insides for the type of worry and uncertainty that leave us feeling heavy with emptiness. They feed on isolation, even in the most populated of areas. So we learn, at that young age, how to accept them. If we don’t, living loses its thrill.

Missouri singer-songwriter Angel Olsen returns on her third album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, to remind us of their power. “I am the only one now,” she sings on opener “Unfucktheworld,” setting the stage in its all too familiar dressings.

Second in prominence to the album’s topics comes Olsen’s “new” style. The previous comparisons have all been beaten to death: Roy Orbison, Jason Molina, Hope Sandoval. We’ve heard her shaken country and her withering folk, but now we get fearless rock that stays tepid to avoid sounding out of place. Burn Your Fire tries to embrace all three in a single, shaking hug. Thankfully, it works. The back-to-back line-up feels somewhat ambitious, but Olsen’s been at it long enough to not let a new label or new home sway her.

“Forgiven/Forgotten,” whose end guitar flustering sounds like a cut-and-paste section from St. Vincent’s solo in “Northern Lights,” is our first taste of this rock. It’s simple in text—the time-consuming process of forgiving and getting over someone— and keeps itself in check as to avoid coming on too strong. As precautionary measures, though, she inserts “Enemy” and “Lights Out” nearby as misplaced Half Way Home tracks.

Even though traditionally stripped-down songs are the ones to prompt lumps in throats, the unbridled force released in her louder tracks feels more pained than any intimate moment. “Stars” sits right beside “Iota,” the prior a dizzying, heart-broken cry for help (“I think you like to see me lose my mind”) and the latter a gorgeous acoustic sigh of defeat (“If only we could turn ourselves around / and all the things we’re looking for were found”). She’s already speaking lines with a sharp reluctance at the thought of reliving memories and hoping for a larger restoration, but the strength of her rock amplifies them into something much fuller.

Throughout the whole record, Olsen writes about loneliness and fear. “White Fire” lays her within the reverb-laden marble walls of a coffin, death breathing beside her before closing off the air. Along with the album title drop comes the rest of the lyric, “it’s the only way it’s done,” instructing listeners to accept solitude when it greets you and shred the past without holding simultaneously it in your mind.

Angel Olsen’s ability to peg these fears is why Burn Your Fire For No Witness is a triumph. It isn’t that she’s helping us realize these fears (does anyone grow up free of them?) or being pessimistic (though the album does have plenty of deflective humor). She’s the same emotionally nomadic girl perched by the window on a rainy day for inspiration, this time stripping torment until there’s nothing but veins, forcing us to supply the heart and lungs. Like the scenario, her work could easily sound cliché, but she’s explaining the inevitable how the rest simply can’t. With deadpan eyes and teeth that barely move, Angel Olsen is teaching us what we already know, so close to the edge with vivid truths that reality stops concealing itself as the breeze we paint it to be.

SCORE: 9.3/10

Review written by: Nina Corcoran (follow her on Twitter)

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Nina Corcoran

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