Bless This Mess: US Girls give us pop's 2nd masterpiece of 2023.
Impossibly, if you can conceive of it, Meg Remy's best yet.
Miraculously, START time music.
But of course, END time music as well. All music worth a listen at the moment - instrumental music also, but especially music with words - is End Time Music. Last year’s two albums of the year for me - Johanna Warren’s ‘Lessons For Mutants’ and Aoife Nessa’s ‘Protector’ - were end time music, and the things most captivating me at the grisly start of this year (Juni Habel’s ‘Carvings’, B.Cool Aid’s ‘Leather Blvd’, Yo La Tengo’s ‘This Stupid World’, Katie Gately’s soon-dropping ‘Fawn/Brute’, Lael Neale ‘Star Eaters Delight’, American Grandma’s ‘Rare Knives Of Light’, and this US Girls album) are all in their way End Times music.
You’ll note that nearly all of those albums are by women. Women, like most marginalised and subjugated peoples, have in recent years been given daily, hourly reminders that this world is irredeemably fucked and that the patriarchy and white supremacy have no end. What that engenders in alot of us is a simultaneous disgust with the distraction of specifics and a focus on what is elemental, what is required to survive. I hear so much music that seems to have this desire to hint at and at times spell out what is essential, get down to the basics of what can make a life, if not worth living, than at least survivable. This end-time music knows the end time will last for all time, has little hope in the outside world beyond the natural world, but finds its light in those things - love, human touch, company, solace, solidarity, physicality and sex - that the last few years of isolation have accentuated the need for. As musicians, many of these artists are making albums that feel like they could be last gasps, precisely because surviving as a musician is currently so perilous. All of the records I’ve mentioned - including this one - crucially have hope, not a daffy hope but the kind of hope you hold on to because heartbreakingly, in end times, in times where making music seems always in existential peril, it’s precisely music that remains the only thing you can lean on, the only thing that might mitigate against the horror of a world shrilly walling itself off into oblivion. In such times I sure as fuck - beyond extreme metal - don’t really need to hear men whining or trying to ‘match’ the darkness of time ticking us towards death. I want insouciant statements of power from the powerless, pop of an almost magical conviction and insistence. Pop, that for its’ duration will sell you the lie you most need to hear - that not all is doomed, that this piece of plastic isn’t just another piece of future detritus, that it might be immortal compassionate armour against your own self-pity. And all of this is what ‘Bless This Mess’ does.
Helps that it sounds so fucking FRESH. FRESH was the word I involuntarily gasped as soon as the gorgeously lambent Gamble/Huff grooves of ‘Only Daedelus’ kicked in, a chorus that juggles situationism with Greek myth (“Under the street, there is the beach/ If you wanna meet me there, I will take up all the concrete/ You can wax these dashboard memories/Only Daedalus coulda thoughta this”) and a sound both lush and propulsive and always enfolding you in, finding you a space to dance. I note that Badge Epoque Ensemble are involved in some of the playing here - do check out their wonderful ‘Clouds Of Joy’ set from last year for more wonder - and the other collaborators throughout ‘Bless This Mess’ are an intriguing mix of sui generis individuals (Max Turnbull aka Slim Twig and Edwin de Goejj and the ever-ready Mantler) who in the creation of this record have found a strange kind of mutually amplified dissident strength, across three different spaces - the HotPurplePettingZoo, That 70s Basement and Clyde’s Temple. ‘Just Space For Light’ swims in on deceptively synthesised, crisp beats almost like liquid-dnb-before-the-drop, Remy singing in reverie about dualities of light and dark, emptiness and eruption (“Hollow is inside, my love - just space for light/ Slow fade to night, deep in thoughtless insight/ Hollow is inside, my love - just space for light’) before the song slips into silence and this massive whalloping GROOVE kicks in, kicks Remy out of her head and out onto the floor, insists that the protagonist keeps the door open, to let the people who care know that the subject is alright, all the while these 80s synth-whorls and the phat-footed funk rendering paralysis impossible. ‘Screen Face’ is as instantly hookily latched into your head as Nintendo’s ‘Wii Plaza’ music, the k/h-ookiness only mildly veiling the incisive lyrics about lockdown love and screen-bound romance - “your face on my screen, my face on your screen/ your phone is dying and i'm dying too/ dying to touch you, dying to be in the same room/ you're the one who waited so long to call/ you coulda hit me up before the world flipped/ then maybe right now we wouldn't be simulatin' it.”
The album keeps the tone shifting and that’s what makes it bustling, interesting, addictive - ‘Futures Bet’ kicks in on a shocking slice of Hendrix-heaviness before becoming a lovely rippling little peal of electro-gospel, lyrics honing down into those elemental aspects of life (“The only thing that true's Is breathing in breathing out/ When nothing is wrong Everything is fine This is just life, this is just life”) clearly inspired by the birth of Meg Remy’s daughter, a theme that resonates throughout the record. ‘So Typically Now’ is a straight-up disco banger that combines the deadpan brilliance of Britney’s ‘Work Bitch’ with a chorus that does that Creedence trick of generosity whereby you start singing harmonies that aren’t there. The first side is closed out with the glowing, radiant title track - Remy absolutely knocking it out the park with a melody so great you can’t believe it hasn’t been retrieved from the 80s, and lyrics that provide sustenance and succour and damn well make you well up, “I heard from God and she said,"I bless this mess. I see you doing yr best/ I bless this mess, Goddamn, yr doing yr best". Oh Meg. Needed to hear that so much. ‘Tux’ kicks of side 2 with perhaps the most glittering pop putsch of the whole record - recalling Timberlake’s finest work and with a groove so peachily perfect it could go toe to toe with Kool & the Gang or EWF - sung from the perspective of a suit in a travel-bag, bemoaning its lack of use, the body it should be on taken over by another body, the body and suit you see through the open window on the record’s front cover.
‘RIP Roy G. Biv’ keeps getting linked in my head to Lil’ Yachty’s latest, all autotuned psyche and lysergic innocence, but with a lyric so perfectly pitched ‘tween pride and resignation it reverberates way deeper than superficially, a resignation that bleeds into the remarkable ‘St. James Way’, a swoonsome glide of dreampop bliss in which Remy’s voice seems to almost falsetto, the collaboration with Rich Morel reminding one of Cyndi Lauper at her most startling. The album closes out on ‘Pump’ wherein Remy samples her own breast-pump and somehow manages to lace it into this gorgeous pellucid ripple of 80s soul-funk, a wonderful call and response between Remy and Alanna Stuart flowing into a closing coda so slo-mo and funky it’s like prime Teddy Pendergrass, then a fade of gentle inquiry and minimal, almost-abstract vamping. I keep getting reminded of Philly soul but also Jam & Lewis throughout this record - crucially the playing isn’t merely an attempt to recover those sounds, but occupies its own unique place of being both influenced by the best but finding its own resolute spirit. ‘Bodies, births, death, machines?’ asks Remy as the album fades with her breaking the fourth wall and seemingly talking directly to us, pointing at us with repeated imprecations ‘You? You? and you and you’. We’re all included in this masterpiece. End times music that feels like an immensely fresh new START. Essential.