"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.
Remy recently signed U.S. Girls to FatCat, so even glossier, higher-fidelity work might be in her future (and will perhaps come in a longer format, as U.S. Girls on KRAAK lasts only 26 minutes). If so, this album is a perfect launching point in that direction. But it's also a triumph on its own. Remy has widened and universalized her music without losing a drop of what previously made it so special and personal.
