US Girls: Bless This Mess (4AD/digital outlets)

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US Girls: Bless This Mess (4AD/digital outlets)

Meg Remy (aka US Girls) offers an aural history lesson as she once again – on this, her eighth album – taps into a smart and immediately enjoyable selection of historical genres and makes them fresh and fun.

So here -- following her terrific Heavy Light of three years ago – we have echoes of the Seventies beamed in for some smooth R'n'B yacht-rock (Only Daedalus could have stepped off a Christopher Cross album), soulful soft-focus soundtracks (the disco-influenced Just Space For Light, Screen Face), the spirit of Genya Ravan in her quavering ballad mode (the title track), sensual disco-funk (Tux), catchy pop over drum machine programmes (Pump) and breathy acoustic pop (St James' Way).

But this is just the surface seduction from this clever, award-winning woman originally from Toronto.

That pop of Pump is about childbirth and the demands of babies on the body and emotions: “My first child was two. Talkin' 'bout two babies at once and those nine months did nothing to prepare me for when I was cut open and they were taken out . . . “

And the Outro (The Let Down) which follows continues the theme about “bodies, birth, death, machines” with “so I'm sending this song out to you in celebration of this bond. This bond that we didn't choose, but that we must live through . . .”

That opening track which names the mythological Greek inventor Daedalus (whose son Icarus tried to fly and went too close to the sun) is actually about a constricting relationship; the pop of Screen Face concerns a distant relationship conducted by technology and the absence of the human contact (a theme returned to on So Typically Now); the moving title track offers “you don't need no map when every road ends. I heard from God and she said, 'I bless this mess. I see you are doing your best' . . ."

So while you might come to dance or simply enjoy some of the smart aural references, US Girls offer much more, everything from sexual longing (the neatly ambiguous gender-questioning Tux about a tuxedo waiting to be worn) to privacy, motherhood, childbirth, and more.

Meg Remy is one of the smartest lyric writers around but has increasingly married her words to music which is immediately attractive.

But once you're hooked, she gently reels you in.

.

You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here. It also comes on bright red vinyl with a cut-away outer sleeve window revealing a photo of pregnant Remy, in an unbuttoned tuxedo, who subsequently gave birth to twins.


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