Angel Olsen – Burn Your Fire for No Witness (2014)

I really like Angel Olsen's music, but I sometimes feel like the lo-fi sounds go a bit too far. This is maybe a strange statement from me, having blamed many other artists for making too polished and overproduced albums. Then again, I feel like Olsen could get a bit more out of her amazing songs with just a slightly better production. Setting the sounds aside, I think Angel Olsen is really cool. Her style of songwriting and playing are really to my liking. She's like a more lo-fi version of Courtney Barnett who I think is one of the greatest songwriters out there at the moment. Olsen's songs range from hypnotic and quiet melancholic pieces to rocking indie songs with great party potential. Olsen is also one of those artists whose music requires a bit longer term attention before the songs fully open up to the listener.



This album was really well received by the critics and it appeared on various lists for best albums in the year 2014. I got very interested back then and really also liked a couple of songs, but it took me a bit longer to fully start appreciating the full album. I guess the quite extreme lo-fi sounds had something to do with it. However, I still thought this album was good enough so I should buy it and when I found it second hand in a small record store in Camberwell, I bought it. Since then, my appreciation towards Angel Olsen has only grown and now I actually fully like this album from start to finish even if some songs still stand out as superior to the rest of the album.

The album starts with a really lo-fi and laconic sounding song Unfucktheworld. I think it might even be intentional to put the most lo-fi song as the first one to scare off people who would not really like the rest of the album either. Bright Eyes has used this technique on pretty much all of their albums. The second song Forgiven/Forgotten has a very different tone. This rough around the edges indie rock tune is gold for a drunk audience who wants to dance. This song is all about the attitude and it works really well for the generation who grew up with grunge playing on the radio. Hi-Five is a prime example of slacker rock that has been popular in the recent years with people like Mac DeMarco and Courtney Barnett leading the way. White Fire, as a song, is like from another planet. This menacingly dark and melancholic ballad is truly hypnotising and beautiful experience. As a fan of melancholia, this is probably my favourite song on the album. High & Wild is another great slacker rock song that I could easily mistake for Courtney Barnett if it was just playing on the radio. Lights Out has a bit more country-style sounds. it sounds like it's a cool lo-fi version of southern US Americana country song. Stars sounds like a crossover between Kurt Vile and Cat Power. There's the melancholia of the latter and the modern rock sound of the former. Iota slows the tempo down a bit but unlike the melancholic ballads we've heard before on this album, this is happier in tone. Dance Slow Decades is an echoey shoegazing song that seems to follow the style that Mazzy Star started in the early 90's. Enemy is stripped of any studio sound or echo and it sounds like Angel Olsen was just sitting next to you playing her new song. As a contrast, the album ends with beautifully airy and echoey song Windows, which gives an etheric blissful feel at the end of the album.

Angel Olsen also has some very cool music videos. The video for Hi-Five doesn't necessarily have that much of a storyline, but it shows stylistically what kind of artist Olsen is. Like her music, the video is also really cool and really appropriate for modern hipsters who appreciate certain type of aesthetic. Video is also seductive, but not in a plastic MTV kind of way, which is appropriate for Olsen's music.

It took me a while to really get this album fully, but the more I listen to it, the more I like it, which is usually a sign of a good album that will stand time well.

Listen to the album on Spotify.