This Heart Still Beats For You

Angel Olsen “Shut Up Kiss Me”

I like the way Angel Olsen sings this with a sort of pouty affect, and how the chorus sounds a bit like a tantrum with its demanding language and clipped phrasing: Shutupkissmeholdmetight! Shutupkissmeholdmetight! It adds a bit of humor to a song that is otherwise pretty sad, and is basically a plea to keep a relationship going despite some resistance on the other end. Olsen is stubborn and tough, and that’s just as much in her language as in her guitar playing and vocal effect, which nudges a melancholy melody into the red without fuzzing it up so much that it obscures the fragility in her performance. It’s just enough to sound like a bit of armor.

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