One-woman show becomes a disco-funk ensemble
U.S. Girls has expanded her sound and her fan base — with lyrics as pointed as ever
To “know” U.S. Girls is to expect a certain recurrent degree of (purposeful) unknowability.
Even if you’ve been following the inscrutable musical career Meg Remy has pursued under that nebulous alias — from its girl-group-fed-through-a-buzzsaw electro beginnings a decade ago through to the Polaris Prize-nominated near-pop of 2015’s stunningly original
Half Free album — and think you already know U.S. Girls to some degree, the live show this former one-woman “band” has mustered in service of her latest release will knock you back a few paces.
These days, U.S. Girls is rolling as an eight-piece, disco-funk “arkestra.” And it freakin’ slays.
I was away for the pair of pre-release gigs Remy performed for In a Poem Unlimited at the Tranzac last October with her backing band, nimble local jazzbo ensemble the Cosmic Range.
So my introduction to the current edition of U.S. Girls — which is touring with only one Range-r in its midst, Remy’s husband and frequent collaborator Max “Slim Twig” Turnbull — came not in Toronto, but in Austin, Texas, during South by Southwest.
The set I caught with two other music-industry professionals from Toronto at Cheer Up Charlie’s ( just one of seven U.S. Girls would play at SXSW), left us all speechless. It was an instant, sun-dappled dance party and easily the best U.S. Girls performance any of us had ever seen.
Sometimes, clearly, you’ve got to leave home to appreciate what you’ve got at home. Remy isn’t boasting, only stating a fact, when she concurs with a compliment that she’s got a fantastic band at the moment.
“I know it is. I feel that way,” she says over a cup of tea and a sax-soaked free-jazz LP in the way-west Bloor St. apartment she shares with Turnbull. “It feels good because I feel like it’s good for people to see. It’s a joyous thing and people dance, and are getting out of themselves and enjoying something, and that’s always good for people.”
It’s always been a goal of Remy’s to someday turn U.S. Girls into more of a band than the suitcase full of lo-fi gear around which she originally built her gigs.
But while she flirted with a slightly expanded lineup around the time of her synth-y 2012 album GEM, it took a few more years in Toronto for the Chicago native — a resident here since the end of 2010 — to build up the web of friendships and connections that made In a Poem Unlimited possible.
Besides Cosmic Range, the ambitious sessions for the new record involved such talented pals as Basia Bulat, Jennifer Castle, Edmonton rocker Michael Rault and Simone Schmidt, whose searing Fiver track “Rage in Plastics” gets a swaggering makeover on Poem. In all, there are about 20 musicians heard on the record.
“I think it was just a lot of things at once coming together, like me finally linking up with a label (4AD) that had good machinery behind it, me meeting enough musicians in Toronto that I would need,” Remy says.
“There are so many people on the record. I needed to meet them all before I could make the record. Even if I’d tried to make this record with Half Free, so many people wouldn’t have been on it.
“It’s great. I wrote with so many people and then we pretty much brought it all to the Range. I was working so long, especially live, with machines that the parameters for improvising were very low. So now, live, it’s so fun. It’s not all on me anymore to make the music.
“And it was equally liberating working in the studio because it’s like you’ve met translators who speak your language instantly … but also have good taste themselves.”
It’s not lost on Remy that In a Poem Unlimited is achieving a prime species of subversion by
“I feel pleased that I can hold my own with a band and I’m not just a weird performance artist.” MEG REMY
luring unsuspecting newcomers into the tangled U.S. Girls universe with music that has almost completely abandoned its more outwardly confrontational beginnings for the seductive grooves and easy pop melodies of ABBA, Madonna and Kylie Minogue.
The lyrical content is as charged as ever; Remy’s preoccupations with abuse and the dehumanizing/demeaning effects of patriarchy and its close cousin, capitalism, remain wholly intact, while she also gets in a shot at departed U.S. president Barack Obama for waging drone wars abroad on “Mad as Hell.”
Behind the newly inviting sonic demeanour, more people are suddenly being blindsided by the abrasiveness of early U.S. Girls offerings such as Introducing and U.S. Girls on KRAAK.
“What’s really funny about it is the album is the most accessible thing … it’s getting put on playlists and all these things that quote/unquote ‘normal’ people check out and then they’re, like, ‘Oh, I love this’ and then they’ll go to the back catalogue on Spotify and it’s just unlistenable,” Remy laughs.
“Well, not unlistenable, but for the average person, it might as well be, like, a washing machine with a radio thrown in it. I really like that. I think it’s the greatest joke I could ever play.”
U.S. Girls play a sold-out hometown show at the Horseshoe Tavern on Thursday, in the midst of a tour that will take Remy from the Northeastern U.S. to Europe and the U.K. into the middle of May. She and the band aren’t booked “tons, just a little bit here and there” as festival season approaches — a fact Remy credits to her reputation as “that weird chick who’s gonna come up here with her machines.”
So she’s prepared to work a long album cycle as word gets around on just how wicked her live show has become.
Word has already sufficiently gotten around that U.S. Girls suddenly found itself playing three shows in one night instead of the one it had planned at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on April 13 to satisfy demand.
It’ll all work out in the end. It’s too good not to.
“Basically, before the record came out, shows were getting booked for all of this and no promoter really wanted to bet on it,” Remy shrugs. “Everyone was looking at previous numbers and previous whatever, and it got booked into really small places with low guarantees or door deals, and then the record dropped and the shows are selling out … I feel pleased that I can hold my own with a band and I’m not just a weird performance artist or whatever. I’m feeling like I’m becoming a musician or something. I’m pleased about it. But I’m just on to the next thing. I just want to make the next record.”