Send "U.S. Girls " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 "It's pretty much all I listen to," Meghan Remy told me when I asked her about pop music last year. "It's the only thing I am really influenced by." That might come as a surprise when you hear the music of her solo project U.S. Girls, which buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. She's even turned pop classics like Bruce Springsteen's "Prove it All Night" and B.J. Thomas' "I Don't Have a Mind of My Own" into basement dirges. But according to Remy, her lo-fi approach is more financial necessity than aesthetic choice. "I would love to make a really clear recording," she said in the same interview. "It's my dream!"That dream is realized on U.S. Girls on KRAAK, which is significantly cleaner and less cacophonous than her previous two full-lengths. The increased clarity reveals some true pop gems, especially the stunning "Island Song", in which Remy's expressive singing sounds both stirring and exultant, inspiring chills and smiles in equal measure. Nearly as good are tracks bearing the influence of doo-wop, Motown, country, and R&B. Remy's love of the latter is especially clear in a Residents-like reworking of Brandy and Monica's "The Boy Is Mine". An album made solely of tunes like that would be strong enough, but what makes U.S. Girls on KRAAK great is how Remy mixes in sounds that are just as odd and idiosyncratic as her previous work. For every melodic nugget, there's a hallucinatory loop, a cloudy drone, or what sounds like the remnants of an exploded pop song-- half of a chorus, shards of a hook-- echoing in the distance. In lesser hands, alternating experiments and tunes could come off forced or gratuitous, but Remy connects them in a way that sounds natural and almost effortless. So when the creepy, voice-in-head "Wells Dubs" flows into the Patsy Cline-styled "Peotone", it's far from jarring. Instead, you can hear how Remy approaches minimalist loops and pop hooks as if they were the same thing and capable of the same infectious effect....full text |
| Electronicbeats |
| Even at her most accessible, Meghan Remy is hardly Top 40 pop material. Which is a shame, because she's making some of the best music most people will never hear. Her latest album discards some of the aggressive noise of previous works in exchange for melody and structure, but loses none of its avant-garde energy, nor it's weird and disturbing beauty. Which makes this album all the more fascinating: in under 30 minutes, Remy manages to lay bare her influences in a way that shows reverence without following a set style. The pounding lo-fi industrialisms of 'Peter' and ' Iran Then, Iraqognized Her' (love the title, by the way) sit side by side with the sultry no-wave lounge of ' Friendlies + Pamela + GG' and the country jangle of 'Peotone'. It seems chaotic at first, but listen to the album as a whole and everything clicks perfectly. This natural flow is one of the hardest things to achieve when releasing an album so untethered by genres or convention, but Remy pulls it off beautifully. The album's climax is, without a doubt, Remy's cover of the Brandy/Monica classic 'The Boy Is Mine'. R&B covers by non-R&B artists can so easily come across as some form of sneering post-irony cheekiness. Here it's done with care and obvious love for the source material, the sultry backoffbitch attitude of the original transformed into a fact as final as the end of the universe: 'This is how it is;' Remy says, grim voice carving the words into stone. 'You have no chance.' It's powerful in an entirely different way and, somehow, even more sexual. From start to finish, U.S. Girls On Kraak is exactly what experimental pop music should be: weird, honest, and insanely listenable....full text |
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