On her new album Heavy Light, Meg Remy of U.S. Girls looks back, both lyrically and musically

Heavy Light goes back further than the seventies, to an age when tom-toms and tambourines were in favour.Supplied

There’s the old joke about the Juno Awards, about the cash-strapped trophy winner who arrives home after the ceremony to find an eviction notice on their door. The wisecrack is as old as Gino Vannelli’s waterbed, coming from a time when musicians actually “sold” records. Which is, you don’t need to be told, no longer the case. I thought of all that while listening to the hot new disc from Meg Remy (as U.S. Girls). Remy has yet to rate a Juno, but she’s an indie-pop semi-star and long a favourite of the tastemakers. She makes groovy music for the magic people, not that that’s going to pay the bills.

“Shake dice or shake your ass,” the American-born, Toronto-based Remy sings on 4 American Dollars, the disco-swirling lead track of Heavy Light, her latest album. “We all do what we gotta do to pass, in this world where they say it’s not personal, it’s business.” We’re living in a cashless society now. Some have fewer dollars than others – Remy is willing to share three of the four she’s got.

With its politics and I-got-to-boogie beat, 4 American Dollars feels like a leftover track from Remy’s previous album, 2018′s In a Poem. On the new LP, 4 American Dollars is an enjoyable outlier. Heavy Light goes back further than the seventies, to an age when tom-toms and tambourines were in favour, and heavy-handed producers such as Shadow Morton ruled and girl-groups the Supremes and the Shangri-Las led packs.

It is against that drama-soaked, black-and-white soundtrack that Remy recolours previously released songs of hers: Overtime, Red Ford Radio and Statehouse (It’s a Man’s World). Vibraphones and marimbas happen. New tune Woodstock ’99 employs an interpolation of Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park, the best song ever made a three-time hit by Richard Harris, Waylon Jennings and Donna Summer.

Remy looks back lyrically as well. The material is introspective; the theme, a meditation on hindsight. A series of spoken-word collages – artful, shorter versions of the hipster podcasts you love to late – enforce the focus.

Of the weaving, multivoiced interludes, The Most Hurtful Thing hits the hardest. “My mom said to me, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I make children like this,’” an anonymous person says. And from someone else: “My father once said to me I would spend an eternity in hell if I don’t do some mysterious magical thing. It was quite confusing at the time.”

It still is confusing. We probably all wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to grow up if we knew adults were just making it up as they went along. On Yet It Moves (Y Se Mueve), Remy sings in Spanish, “They lie to us about everything, don’t they? Lie to us about yesterday, so we don’t understand tomorrow.”

So, while Remy is musically nostalgic, she’s no romantic otherwise. There never were any kinder, gentler times. Any Richard, Waylon or Donna can sing about the cake that someone left out in the rain. Remy is one of the few that bothers to go back to take the mess back inside.

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