Pitchfork

"Kiss" is a pretty powerful love song, more lucid and soulful than you might expect from Scout Niblett and Will Oldham, but this clip, directed by Judah Switzer and Niblett, teases out the unsettling weirdness in every romance. It begins with the duo getting ready for a date Scout-style: Oldham in a skeleton costume, Niblett donning a ratty wig and stuffing bread in her upper lip. What follows trippily subverts such romantic comedy clichés as the split-screen telephone conversation and the romp on the beach, playing them as obligatory relationship rites that become positively Lynchian in such shallow depth of field and especially against the soul-baring soundtrack. While they occasionally come across as too cutesily abstract in costume, both lovers/singers lend the clip its human-scale levity (Niblett lip-syncing into a brush, Oldham shaking his rump) as well as its exaggerated gravity (Niblett singing directly at the camera, Oldham perpetrating violence upon patio furniture). Bread Girl and Skeleton Boy were made for each other.