Alex Cameron is a duo from Sydney, Australia featuring bandleader Cameron and saxophone player Roy Molloy. Frontman Alex comes with a ratty River Phoenix look and an ear for great pop music usually found on stage in an empty bar. On "Stranger's Kiss," Cameron's duet with Angel Olsen, the ambition of Alex Cameron expands from insular synthpop to a sweeping, Springsteen-inspired ballad about a strange loneliness.
That feeling is embodied in the video written and directed by Jemima Kirke of Girls fame, which is premiering today on The FADER. Kirke stars as an Alex Cameron doppelganger who's searching the streets for her double. It's funny, and strange, and like the song, it's got more than enough power to carry you through the emotions it elicits.
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Over email, Cameron gave a moving reading of the clip.
"'Stranger's Kiss' is a song about a couple in the midst of a breakup taunting each other with sarcastic advice and threats of despair as they grapple with their new found freedom. In life we question our own potential for independence. And the abusive ones will manipulate that doubt into codependency. 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. No matter how unhealthy, superficial or unsustainable that dynamic may be - this love offers brief but blissful moments of relief for whatever pains a person can endure. And that's what the clip is about.
Alex Cameron's new album Forced Witness is out September 8 via Secretly Canadian. Preorder it here.
Thumbnail photo by Chris Rhodes
