U.S. Girls – Go Grey
Anyone that can make label-mates and lo-fi noiseniks Psychedelic Horseshit seem playful deserves investigation. And those that successfully navigate U.S. Girl ‘s ( Megan Remy ‘s) choked pathways and sinister open spaces will be rewarded with infinitely distant, nihilistic, no-fi pop-punk for their troubles. Many will get lost on the way.
Penetrating Remy’s second long-player is not for the uninitiated. Much like the punishing pop of 2008’s Introducing …, Go Grey is minimal, bleak and dissonant. Echoes, apocalyptic percussion and tape fuzz dominate. Stark drum machine loops compete with genuine distortion as Remy wails atonally from mid-distance.
Instrumental passages, such as “Summer Of The Yellow Dress”, are rife with feedback and enough cacophony to rival a campanology training centre. Elsewhere, surges of heavily reverbed guitar clatter with wheezing drum patterns and unworldly, mechanical foreboding. Sheering, nauseous rolls bottom out into an unsupported, bass-heavy guitar lick in “Sleeping On Glass”. Chirruping, tinny drones announce the psychedelic jam of “His Son’s Future”, which ends in the relative calm of wind chimes.
Yet, to its credit, Go Grey also houses discernable songs. “I Don’t Have A Mind Of My Own” is fun-time rock ‘n’ roll as performed during a dystopian B-movie massacre sequence. Lolloping and wallowing in smashed snares, “The Mountain’s High”, a cover of the Dick and Dee Dee track, lurches darkly from somewhere deep within the throat.
The slow drum machine echo of “Red Ford Radio” introduces some parallel-pop to proceedings. Trancelike in its simplicity and poppish repeats, its discernable lyrics are buoyed by a down-tempo rhythm, and the haunting “Blue Eyes On The Blvd is an entirely marketable exercise in restraint that whispers with sanity-questioning voices on unaccompanied waves of sparse, echoing guitar.
Now that lo-fi abounds, Go Grey is the sound of Remy making a play for her own turf, smashing down post-production posers as she goes. Her talent may not be evident to most, but in making the seemingly unlistenable listenable, or close to it, she allows a sense of co-operation to permeate. Those willing to meet her halfway, in the grey to today’s black and white market, may well never regret it.
Go Grey is out now on Siltbreeze .