Angel Olsen Is a Glam Country Star on “Shut Up Kiss Me”
“Um, do I need to give more attitude, or…?” Angel Olsen asks the cameraman at the end of the video for “Shut Up Kiss Me,” her second silver-wigged clip this month. In “Intern,” she shrugged that every day, we “still gotta wake up and be someone.” For Olsen’s fourth album, MY WOMAN, that role is apparently glam country rockstar who’s not pulling any punches. The record’s lead single cut dead to a dial tone; this one struggles to contain her impatience with a flip-floppy lover, her initially sweet entreats boiling over into strutting fuzz and exasperated but heartfelt demands. “Shut up! Kiss me! Hold me tight!” she commands over and over, like a hysterical 1920s actress hauled in to front a sharp bar band.
That snippet of b-roll is clearly a giant joke. Olsen’s songs have often occupied an internal landscape where thoughts weigh heavy and loners fret over how to say that thing they really need to say to someone. “Shut Up Kiss Me” is all action, hang the consequences and anguished rationale, and if there’s any distance between Olsen and what she’s projecting, she hides it consummately. She rocked out on 2014′s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, but always from behind a thick curtain of murk. “Shut Up Kiss Me” is precise as her demands, illuminating every pyrotechnic reaction in Olsen’s throat. “We could still be having some sweet memories,” she sings towards the start of the track, her voice catching like a match against the striking strip. Eventually, she concedes, “It’s all over baby, but I’m still young,” like a volcano about to blow. It’s an appropriately apocalyptic note: “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a come-on for these times when the end of the world feels nigh, so what the hell are you waiting for?
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