Burn Your Fire for No Witness
ANGEL OLSEN (JAGJAGUWAR)
ON ANGEL Olsen's breakout "Half Way Home", the arrangements were simplified. if rarely simple. The range came not only in Olsen's emotions, but also in her striking and unpredictable voice.
Olsen doesn't repeat the formula with "Burn Your Fire For No Witness", Instead,she spends this excellent album distorting and blowing out those folk textures, sometimes with control of aural space, sometimes with thick and tangled musical arrangements. The breadth of sounds matches the hairpin turns her voice can take, and these songs take full advantage of these new musical roads.
"Hi-Five" is perhaps the most interesting musical piece here and sets up a common trope through the album, where Olsen imagines the emotional distance between people as an arid landscape, where you can faintly picture barbed tumbleweeds rolling through grainy shots of desert spaces.