The American Girl is an expensive doll. She comes packaged with a history that follows a tidy narrative trajectory: She has and will overcome obstacles with grace, poise, and beauty. She will know no prolonged sadness, nor wonder as to her purpose. These are the promises on which she was raised. She knows the longer she stays in her box, the more she’s worth. But if she looks out at the world long enough, she’ll realize she’s only ever seen it through a warped plastic window. What’s an American girl to do?
Since her 2018 breakthrough, In a Poem Unlimited, the response of Meg Remy—the sole member of U.S. Girls—has been to embrace the hyperreal. Like a version of Neo who returns to the Matrix and becomes Patrick Bateman, she swallows up the plastic exploitation of the last six decades of American pop music and flaunts its excesses. If it’s typically impossible to tell when she’s satirizing and when she’s simply feeling the pleasure of singing and moving her body to a well-made song, that ambiguity is probably the point. On Scratch It, her most immediate and accessible album, she leaves the ’80s electro-funk of 2023’s Bless This Mess behind and remakes herself as a mid-’60s country crooner in a shimmering skirt. While it calls to mind Cat Power’s Memphis masterpiece The Greatest and the haunted beehive of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, Scratch It buzzes with a chattering methamphetamine sleaziness, as much Vegas as it is Nashville. The TNN studio lights that frame this record are so hot, they make the music sweat.
As with most U.S. Girls albums, sweating is what this music most wants to do. Remy’s project is conceptually heavy, but what’s kept her uncanny avant-pop from being some tedious academic exercise—or, worse, a ribald pomo take on established styles—is that she always remembers to bring her body with her: “Under the street there is a beach,” she sings in 2023’s “Only Daedalus,” whose slinky quiet storm beat is a reminder that the situationists who turned that phrase into the slogan of the 1968 student protests saw pleasure as the end goal of liberation.
On Scratch It, she’s looser than ever before, letting the contradictions arise naturally rather than spelling them out. “James said you gotta dance till you feel better,” she sings in the opening “Like James Said,” quoting “Get Up Offa That Thing” while cheekily calling the man who demanded to be addressed as “Mr. Brown” by his first name. She flips the gospel standard “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” into a jam about the freedom of a good fuck. “You had boots on/I had bare feet/It was a natural conspiracy,” she sings, a David Berman opener delivered in a husky T-Boz register. “Firefly on the 4th of July” marches to a martial snap whose every beat is pillowed by a lead line from guitarist Dillon Watson that wanders and flits like a lazy bee. “Thank god I was looking good when I saw you,” Remy sings, a little sun drunk, delivering her lines with the relish of Jeannie C. Riley socking it to the Harper Valley PTA.
If you’re going to reimagine one of the 20th century’s most potent musical moments, it helps to have someone who was there. The group Remy assembled for Scratch It not only includes Watson and the Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence, the latter of whom played bass on Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose, but also legendary Nashville session man Charlie McCoy. That’s his trumpet on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” his guitar on “Desolation Row,” his harmonica on “The Boxer” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man.” In “The Clearing,” Remy puts up an insistent protest against the violence of a world whose bounds are policed by an unimaginative society. She stacks her rhymes as she hacks her way through “vulgar men” and “awful crews,” but just as she clears some space, McCoy threads a thin, lonesome harmonica solo that softens the song without pulling it out of focus, until it sounds like “Masters of War” playing alongside “Pancho and Lefty.” The ability to create such a dialectical sound—pissed and strident and warm and full of love, all of it at once—is one of Remy’s greatest strengths as a songwriter and arranger. The longer she holds conflicting ideas and emotions together, the more these songs glow.
Across Scratch It, Remy’s vocal tone and pitch land somewhere between the babydoll pout of Gwen Stefani and the down-home coo of Dolly Parton. It’s a voice tinted with the winking irony of the woman who knows that the people who underestimate her haven’t realized she’s outsmarting them yet. It gives the characters of her songs the appearance of self-possession even when they’re being pulled to pieces by everyone and everything, from the “men who tear what cannot mend” and “the old embittered flow” of the world in “The Clearing” to her own impulses in “Emptying the Jimador.” The spell of “Firefly on the 4th of July” is broken by the reality of motherhood. “I’m just laying here divided by my sons,” Remy sings near the song’s end. “Will no one come and find me and save me?”
Remy reflected on the birth of her twins on Bless This Mess, and here she again finds herself forced to choose between being a present mom and leading a rich and fulfilling life as an individual. In “Dear Patti,” she laments missing Patti Smith’s performance at a festival in which they were “the only two women on the stage.” “I was making sure my kids didn’t fall in the lake,” she sings, exasperated and not a little heartbroken, her voice lined with a twinned devotion and regret like Nick Cave singing about loss. Just outside of the song’s frame, unmentioned by Remy but presumably present in her mind, is the fact that Smith herself stepped away from performing for nearly two decades so she could focus on raising her own children, a decision that, in the context of the song, feels heroic and empowering.
The characters in Remy’s songs accordingly find their strength by accepting the limits of their experience and embracing the person those limits turn them into. In “Bookends,” the 12-minute centerpiece so big it threatens to turn the rest of the album into its own bookends, she paces around the death of Power Trip singer Riley Gale, with whom she was close. “Riley was always going on about the cross and breaking it,” she sighs, referencing Power Trip’s signature song, “Crossbreaker.” The band plays hushed soul music behind her, turning in a slow circuit around the singer, who directs her mourning inwards. “Become the center of the void and let go,” Gale shouts in “Crossbreaker,” and as “Bookends” builds, then breaks into a sprinting proto-disco boogie, Remy herself lets go, pushing her vocals until she’s nearly left the song behind in devilish euphoria. “I’m still wondering where Riley went,” she yelps.
It’s here, at Scratch It’s peak, with her poise left behind in the strobe and engulfed by the hollow at the center of life, that Remy paradoxically feels most embodied. She’s no longer the 21st-century performer with a knowing wink, holding a mic cable like a bridal train as she makes her way across the stage and hits her marks. “Like it or not, that’s what you got,” she sings, in a fit, fully alive, chopping the song’s groove deeper and deeper. She’s doing exactly what Mr. Brown said she should. The song fades out, so the dancing never stops.
