Early in Naomi Alderman’s 2017 novel The Power, teenage girls gain the ability to produce an electric charge with their bodies. This “electrostatic power” is channeled through a set of muscles at the collarbone called a skein. It allows women the ability to change their circumstances, and the way that individuals grapple with their new authority is a primary concern of the novel. Alderman’s book is one of a series of new works of art that are helping to, in the words of the writer Rebecca Traister, adjust “American ears to the sound of female anger—righteous and defensive, grand and petty.” Another, one that shares many qualities with The Power, is Meg Remy’s striking new album as U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited.
Remy, an American expatriate who lives in Toronto, has been making music under the name U.S. Girls since 2007, but the moniker used to be a kind of joke. Her music was so idiosyncratic, even, at times, solipsistic. Responding to those qualities early in her career, Artforum called her “a woman who clearly spends a lot of time in her apartment with the shades drawn.” And reviewing her 2012 album GEM, the last released before she signed to 4AD, Pitchfork said of U.S. Girls that “you can tell without peeking at the liner notes that this is a project born of solitude and isolation.”
But by the time her 2015 record, Half Free came out, Remy had begun to open the band to external voices. And three years later, U.S. Girls has become a cacophony. In a Poem Unlimited, at once the most accessible and sharply violent U.S. Girls album to date, is the product of more than two dozen collaborators, many of them members of the Toronto funk and jazz collective the Cosmic Range. Not a single song was written by Remy alone; two were even written without her input. And yet, the glam and surf rock, disco and pop, (glorious, danceable pop!) on the record speaks to a unified vision, one of spit, fury, and chuckling to keep from crying.
Though it is unmistakably a record about women’s anger in its various shades and forms, Remy signals her awareness of male canons throughout (its title comes from Hamlet and the song “Rosebud” is a clear reference to Citizen Kane.) Those landmark texts are there to be turned inside out: Remy is interested in creating new mythologies, fertilizing stale old ground to nurture a different sort of harvest. The shuffling funk of “Pearly Gates,” for instance, turns a story of quotidian male cluelessness into a religious allegory, asking how a heaven controlled by men could ever be safe.
That might sound to some like a facile observation. But none of the songs on Poem can be folded neatly into a box. Remy remains a narrative savant wedded to the thrill of the unexpected, the razor under the tongue, and she fills her songs with cryptic passages and unexpected allusions. Making a record without psychological depth (or music fit to accompany it) might cause her to break out into hives. The album’s first track, the foreboding, psychedelic “Velvet 4 Sale” sets up a woman’s revenge tale. With its breathy ad-libs and spiraling, almost-Western cinematic synths, it would slot nicely into the soundtrack of Kill Bill: Vol 2, and it includes that most phallic of all musical passages, the guitar solo. The song, co-written with Remy’s husband, the musician Max Turnbull, begins in media res: “You’ve been sleeping with one eye open because he always could come back, ya know? And you’ve been walking these streets unguarded waiting for any man to explode.” It ends (spoiler alert!) with a woman instructing another on how to ensure that her male target is dead.
Hamlet, too, is nominally a revenge tale. But just as revenge becomes a portal to the many layers of Shakespeare’s play, so too do does In a Poem Unlimited soon migrate to more complex scenarios. On the extraordinary “Rage of Plastics,” Remy explores, with sax and surf guitar, the bubbling resentment of a woman whose job at an oil refinery has made her infertile. And good luck solving the riddle contained within the funky dirge “L-Over,” a song about ditching a mysterious lover, an animate being with no heart. With few exceptions, these are stories about how women react after being done wrong. But the reactions are so varied that it feels as if each belongs to a different individual, and the album comes to feel like an entire community in tense conversation with itself.
The musical vocabulary of U.S. Girls has also become so expansive that it can be difficult to pin down. There are flashes of Marc Bolan and Frank Zappa, ’70s psychedelia and Terry Riley’s ambient extravaganzas, but new to Remy’s palette is a disco-driven pop, stoking a wild celebratory spirit barely restrained by traditional verses and choruses. “Incidental Boogie,” “Rosebud,” and most especially “M.A.H.,” the album’s spiritual and intellectual centerpiece, glow with the spirit of Madonna, or ABBA with bayonets concealed under those flowing white robes. Remy has talked about pop as a form of bait, to draw listeners in to her more complex ideas. “M.A.H.” barely disguises an anthem of righteous anger directed toward an old romance. “As if you couldn’t tell, I’m mad as hell,” she sings in her wiry alto. “I won’t forget so why should I forgive?” She’s used the best, catchiest song on the record, you come to realize, to rail against an unlikely antagonist: Barack Obama.
Because Obama, for Remy, is just another avatar of male authority, the kind that she takes on without scruples. On “M.A.H.” she accuses the 44th president of fraudulence, charming half a country while continuing to wage its wars and eavesdrop on its citizens. Remy spelled her more broad skepticism of political power out in a 2016 interview, around the time she had embarked on making the record. “The violence that women experience on an individual basis from other individual men, in my mind it mirrors the violence that’s going on around the world,” she said. “It’s the same as the police brutality that’s happening in the States, it’s the same as the bombing of the Syrian people.” In telling the story of her relationship with Obama as a bad romance, she underscores the way that the most casual forms of male misbehavior are political. And on In a Poem Unlimited, Remy lives within their violence for 37 minutes, seeding it with her own ideas and the sounds of camp and disco records. Thirty-nine years after tens of thousands of people attended the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, it’s as if she’s staged an album-long counterprotest, bringing the artifacts of the patriarchy to the stadium and burning them to ash.
The characters of In a Poem Unlimited exist far from a comfortable echo chamber. Their rage may be understandable, and expressed through Remy’s songs, but, as the album closes, her songs become skeptical, cautious, pensive, and even meditative. The album comes to resemble something like a time-spanning mirror. It anticipates the full range of the conversation that’s been raging in public since October, the complicated, multi-faceted and nuanced exchange that the opponents of the #MeToo movement keep pleading for, ignoring that it’s happening already. Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.
