Nine years ago, Meghan Remy of U.S. Girls did something that might have prompted the frontperson of another, more literal-minded band to consider changing its name. She moved to Canada.
But the moniker “U.S. Girls” had always been something of a lark. Remy was, technically, the only person in the band, and her earliest compositions were lo-fi, bedroom-recorded experiments born of solitude and a do-it-yourself ethos. The neo-no-wave music on albums like “Go Grey” from 2010 was murky, eerie and urgent, like a decaying time capsule.
On her seventh album, “Heavy Light,” out Friday, Remy, 34, revisits some of those early songs, albeit with a fresh musical tool kit and a dense Rolodex of collaborators she’s been updating for the past decade — including Bruce Springsteen’s current saxophonist Jake Clemons, whom Remy befriended at a 2018 music festival, the percussionist Ed Squires and her voice coach, Kritty Uranowski, who did the album’s vocal arrangements.
“I really wanted the main focus of the record to be percussion and voice,” Remy said on a February afternoon in Manhattan, over a lunch of soba noodles and sake. She realized that’s actually how she used to work. “So I was like, I should see how these songs are different, now that I’ve gone through vocal lessons and I’m actually working with classical percussionists.”
In conversation, Remy is slyly funny and soberly thoughtful — she pulled out a volume of the philosopher Jean Baudrillard so she could quote him at length. After a decade on the fringes of the indie music world, her previous release, the 2018 album “In a Poem Unlimited,” was something of a breakthrough: On the surface — lush hooks and slinky disco beats — it was her most accessible record yet, until you listened to what Remy was actually singing.
“I was trying to work in that pop form and make those perfect vocals, while saying things that would never be said in that form,” she explained. The songs spun tales of rape revenge, church-related hypocrisy and labor violations (the sax-driven “Rage of Plastics” was partially inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911). On tour, at her merch table, fans could purchase foam middle fingers printed with the title of another “Poem” song, “Mad as Hell.”
Operating within the aesthetic of modern pop music was eye-opening but exhausting. “I learned a lot, but I knew I would never work that way again,” Remy said. “We comped the vocals to hell — so you’re taking one syllable from here and another from there and making them perfect. It was great, though, because now any [pop] music I hear, I know it’s been airbrushed, even when it doesn’t need to be.” She gestured toward the speaker at the noodle shop, where Dua Lipa’s 2016 hit “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” was playing, as an example of pop perfectionism. “Maybe the note is wrong, but it’s conveying something that goes away when you tune it.”
From her 2012 glam-rock record “Gem” to the girl-group-influenced EP “Free Advice Column,” restless evolution has been the only constant in Remy’s musical universe. “I think you kind of train people to know that you’re going to change, or that you’re not,” she said. The jump from “Poem” to “Heavy Light” is the latest evidence. Recording the new album was a relief, Remy said, because this time all the vocals were tracked live. Still, her voice is a sturdier and more finely expressive instrument than it was on her early records.
“Heavy Light” contains many of the most technically impressive vocal performances in her discography, including the piano-driven ballad “IOU” and the turn-of-the-millennium torch song “Woodstock ’99,” a coming-of-age tale set around that infamously macho cultural touchstone. “You watched it all on Pay-Per-View, stationary cameras giving you a private view,” Remy sings in a genuinely moving falsetto.
Remy’s songs are full of challenging, hard-won emotion, and in conversation she similarly dismisses the comforts of empty optimism. Though plenty of her American peers might constantly threaten to move to Canada, she rejects the idea that her adopted home country is anything close to utopian. (She gained Canadian citizenship after marrying the musician Max Turnbull, who records as Slim Twig.) “There’s health care and grants. But other than that, it’s the same thing,” she said. “You can’t escape the residue of colonialism. So although I’m very glad I moved to Canada, and my quality of life is better, to admit that is to admit that it’s on the backs of other people.”
Remy’s politics have always been radical and anticapitalist, but for all its focus on systemic ills, “Heavy Light” is also attuned to more private, internal traumas. Spoken-word interstitials find Remy asking her collaborators the most hurtful thing anyone ever said to them, and what advice they would give their teenage selves. She said this approach and the record’s fascination with hindsight is influenced by her recent interest in somatic, or “body-based” therapy.
“We’re all dragging our childhoods around with us every day,” she said. “The more you acknowledge your younger self within you, the better it behaves. When you don’t acknowledge it, it acts out like a child does.”
For the moment, her inner child was rejoicing: We’d just received the unexpected news that our meal came with free ice cream. Remy ordered a scoop of green tea, and continued, “It’s a hard balance, though, because you can only look back so much. You can’t get stuck there.”
“Heavy Light” is a heartfelt pursuit of that equilibrium. Its closing track is a new version of “Red Ford Radio,” a singsongy dirge that first appeared on “Go Grey” 10 years ago. Though the sound is cleaner and fuller-bodied, it’s somehow more haunting for the legibility of its vision. Repurposing the songs of U.S. Girls’ past is, in the end, another way for Remy to challenge what she calls “the overculture” and its obsession with novelty and planned obsolescence. These days, she said, “Everything’s new. New, new, new! Whereas it’s kind of an older thing to keep songs alive from your catalog and keep doing them in different ways.”
“If you’ve written some sturdy songs,” she added, “they’re always fresh.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
