Video: Alex Cameron, ‘Stranger’s Kiss’ (feat. Angel Olsen)

Cassandra Cronin on August 2nd, 2017

0

We know Alex Cameron from his 2013 album “Jumping the Shark,” the minimalist pop noir opus that skated precariously tight circles around the lovingly banal ’80s-throwback releases of recent rock history. With his past single “Candy May,” Cameron and his saxophonist counterpart Roy Molloy were ever closer to becoming another quaint retro outfit, trying on that sonic Canadian tuxedo worn threadbare by the Bryan Adams and Bruce Springsteens of yesteryear. So when the video for “Stranger’s Kiss” arrived this morning, flaunting a duet with Angel Olsen and a directorial credit to Jemima Kirke (“Girls”), we forewent our usual coffee and started with the 4 1/2-minute weirdo vignette about a gender-bending Kirke in search of her Aussie songwriter doppelganger, through the streets and subways of New York City. They bust some sly dance moves in front of passers-by and hand out flyers printed with Cameron’s headshot. Most of all, they feverishly love on one another and we can’t be sure if it’s admiration or sheer loneliness that done it.

With a sound that persists in wearing its influences so plainly on its jean-jacket sleeves, Cameron tunes like “Stranger’s Kiss” — which appears on Cameron’s sophomore album “Forced Witness,” out Sept. 8 — could come across forced and ham-handed in their delivery. But like any good songwriter, Cameron evades that with memorable turns of phrase (“They made a meme out of my legacy, darling”) and a beguiling production style that pushes flourishes of synth and sax to glimmer just behind the duo’s heart-wrenching harmonies, peppered with an economical string arrangement and a sweet clamor of rack toms.

Cameron says of the video: “In life we question our own potential for independence. And the abusive ones will manipulate that doubt into co-dependency. So we sacrifice singledom for company. The video Jemima wrote and directed brings the tenderness of love within the song to the surface — two people obsessed with who they want to be. Clinging onto chemical love regardless of destitution. We see blind idolisation. The two each give the other what they always wanted and needed. And that is a type of strange love.”

||| Watch: The video for “Stranger’s Kiss”