Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire
2/5

Angel Olsen lets her captivating and emotive voice speak for itself from the very first track of her second feature length album. The scratchy, vinyl-like vocals are distorted yet full of passion. She brings this sound through the whole album and, rather than grating, it adds a powerful and signature quality to each track. ‘Hi-Five’ is one of the best tracks on the album, hauntingly upbeat and melodic, she pokes fun at the irony of communal loneliness. The whole album resonates with heartbreak, and this comes through most organically in the morose ballad ‘White Fire’, in which the stripped-back delivery acts as a gloomy respite in between the short, punchy songs that sandwich it. In tracks like ‘Forgiven/Forgotten’ and ‘High and Wild’, the ache of sad lyricism seems to heal with its buoyant instrumentation and her voice seems to swell most powerfully with the doom and gloom of newly-single life. This is clearly a very personal work which shows a movement from the enamoured sparky folksinger debut to a frank, poignant work that relies far more on the dissonant electronic instrumentation to accompany her story. It’s an honest take on the classic coming of age second album.