Give It Up

Angel Olsen recorded "Burn Your Fire for No Witness" in a room whose reverb suggests either a church or a farmhouse, the space audible in the sound. "Give It Up" opens with a guitar figure that circles back on itself, unhurried and quietly desolate, establishing an atmosphere before the voice arrives. Olsen's voice is one of the more singular instruments in contemporary independent music — a dramatic soprano that can hold a note until it quivers, theatrical in a way that acknowledges the theater without condescending to it or winking at the audience. The song addresses the exhaustion of loving someone who will not or cannot commit, the titular instruction aimed both outward and inward simultaneously, a command to stop pursuing and also a grieved concession to the inevitable. There is a country-music directness to the lyric — plainspoken and undecorated — but the production puts it in a stranger, more psychologically dense space than country radio would accommodate. The vocal performance climbs and subsides in a pattern that mirrors the emotional content precisely: reaching, plateauing, reaching again without resolution. Listeners who have spent time in the slow conclusion of something that kept feeling reversible will find the song disarmingly accurate.