HEAVY LIGHT | U.S. GIRLS

4.3.20 With a rich vox, that is a great combination of Patti Smith, Kate Bush and Erykah Badu, Meg Remy has, once again, compiled a beautiful layered experimental soulful pop release with Heavy Light. Ingredients: Spoken word collage interludes of different people speaking, that is perhaps from therapy sessions | Awesome jazz vibes infused throughout (like Tindersticks, below) | Powerful soulful backing vocals | Beautiful songwriting | Unpredictable | Original

Sophie Kemp at Pitchfork writes: In her long career as a sound collagist and pop music obsessive, Meg Remy has thrived in moments of feminized vitriol. The women of Remy’s songs are so often threatening to asphyxiate themselves, on the verge of suicide, and mad as hell. For much of her career, U.S. Girls has been an exploration of female violence and rage. But Heavy Light, Remy’s seventh album, lives in that period of emptiness that comes after.

Like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Heavy Light is a sideways look at the history of pop music and the capitalist world in which it thrives. What’s different here is how it sounds, and how it feels. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless grief. It’s dense, heady, hard to grasp, but that’s what makes her music so rich. Remy casts herself as a pop star and reflects on the traumas of childhood and earth through parables and the music we grew up on. . .