Angel Olsen’s Half Way Home felt instantaneously classic for its supernatural vocals and dark poeticism, but most of our listening energy went into efforts to follow her gorgeous voice into outer space. With Burn Your Fire For No Witness, Olsen anchors her sound to the ground with earthen guitar fuzz and grungy melancholia. It’s still as ghostly and achingly beautiful as Half Way Home, except better suited for repeat-plays.
It’s an unfortunate truth that pain often results in good art, and such is the truth with Burn Your Fire For No Witness, which throbs with frustration and regret. Her wounds are still tender, so it’s an emotional, one-sided conversation that we feel privy to throughout our listening. “This all would be so much easier if only I had nothing more to say.” Olsen feels deeply and, because of the intoxicating purity of her vulnerability, so do we.
Burn Your Fire For Your Witness starts off with “I quit my dreamin’ the moment that I found you…Here’s to thinking that it all meant so much more. I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door.” These lines set the stage for the mesmerizing songs to follow that speak of the loss and loneliness she’s experienced — the song ends with pointed repetitions of “I am the only one now.” But a few breaths later, garage pop fuzz invades the somber space she’s hollowed out with “Forgiven/Forgotten”, in which she confesses, “I don’t know know anything, but I love you. Yes, I do.” She’s still sorting things out, working her way through all the phases that follow a painful separation. Her feeling may be a bit muddled still, but her aggressive sonic direction is clear. So, it’s with this song, track two, that we wake to the fact that we’re in for a whole new Angel Olsen listening experience.
“Hi-Five” is a country grunge sweetheart, provoking grins when she sings, “Are you lonely, too? High five. So am I,” drenched in sarcasm. Next, “White Fire” is a sparse solo offering that finds Olsen zoning out somewhere inside an existential and television haze as she wanders through her thoughts alone in her apartment: “I heard my mother thinking me right back to my birth. I laughed so hard inside myself, it all began to hurt.” She reaches down deep inside us with dazed repetitions of “fierce and light and young…”, and we feel her sedate desire not to feel.
Shifting slightly from anger to wistfulness, the next few tracks wrestle with the excruciating “I wish” and “If only” factors of gazing backwards. “I wish I had the voice of everything. I wish had the voice of everything. To scream the animals, to scream the earth. To scream the stars out of our universe. To scream it all back into nothingness. To scream the feeling til there’s nothing left…” Relief via total obliteration. Classic Olsen vocals and sparseness return in “Enemy”, and she talks of letting go: “I wish it were the same as it is in my mind. I’m lighter on my feet when I’ve left some things behind.” Burn Your Fire For No Witness’s closing track is also its most moving (and my new all-time favorite of hers). With “Windows”, Olsen implores her ex-lover to “open a window sometime”, asking “what’s so wrong with the light?” Here, she sets down her weighty baggage, and the release is felt, embedded in the delicate, almost spiritually airy atmosphere of the song. “Windows” is masterful in every way, especially in its placement as last track.
Angel Olsen pushes her sound into new sonic terrain with Burn Your Fire For No Witness, but the evolution serves her well. Instead of picturing her scribbling down these songs into a notebook alone in her room, we imagine her ripping the pages out and singing them straight into the eyes of the one who has injured her. The thematic intensity is matched by a full, fierce sound that further fans the searing, smoldering loneliness that makes Burn Your Fire For No Witness so very memorable.
