The American Woman is an costly doll. She comes packaged with a historical past that follows a tidy narrative trajectory: She has and can overcome obstacles with grace, poise, and wonder. She is going to know no extended disappointment, nor surprise as to her function. These are the guarantees on which she was raised. She is aware of the longer she stays in her field, the extra she’s value. But when she appears out on the world lengthy sufficient, she’ll notice she’s solely ever seen it by way of a warped plastic window. What’s an American lady to do?
Since her 2018 breakthrough, In a Poem Limitless, the response of Meg Remy—the only member of U.S. Women—has been to embrace the hyperreal. Like a model of Neo who returns to the Matrix and turns into Patrick Bateman, she swallows up the plastic exploitation of the final six a long time of American pop music and flaunts its excesses. If it’s sometimes unimaginable to inform when she’s satirizing and when she’s merely feeling the pleasure of singing and transferring her physique to a well-made music, that ambiguity might be the purpose. On Scratch It, her most fast and accessible album, she leaves the ’80s electro-funk of 2023’s Bless This Mess behind and remakes herself as a mid-’60s nation crooner in a shimmering skirt. Whereas it calls to thoughts Cat Energy’s Memphis masterpiece The Biggest and the haunted beehive of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, Scratch It buzzes with a chattering methamphetamine sleaziness, as a lot Vegas as it’s Nashville. The TNN studio lights that body this document are so sizzling, they make the music sweat.
As with most U.S. Women albums, sweating is what this music most needs to do. Remy’s mission is conceptually heavy, however what’s stored her uncanny avant-pop from being some tedious tutorial train—or, worse, a ribald pomo tackle established kinds—is that she all the time remembers to deliver her physique together with her: “Beneath the road there’s a seashore,” she sings in 2023’s “Solely Daedalus,” whose slinky quiet storm beat is a reminder that the situationists who turned that phrase into the slogan of the 1968 scholar protests noticed pleasure as the top purpose of liberation.
On Scratch It, she’s looser than ever earlier than, letting the contradictions come up naturally moderately than spelling them out. “James mentioned you gotta dance until you are feeling higher,” she sings within the opening “Like James Mentioned,” quoting “Get Up Offa That Factor” whereas cheekily calling the person who demanded to be addressed as “Mr. Brown” by his first title. She flips the gospel customary “Only a Nearer Stroll With Thee” right into a jam concerning the freedom of an excellent fuck. “You had boots on/I had naked toes/It was a pure 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 each beat is pillowed by a lead line from guitarist Dillon Watson that wanders and flits like a lazy bee. “Thank god I used to be trying good after I noticed you,” Remy sings, just a little solar drunk, delivering her strains with the relish of Jeannie C. Riley socking it to the Harper Valley PTA.
