Live Look: U.S. Girls @ The Dance
Meghan Remy hosts a theatrical sendoff to a short-lived NYC venue while launching the next phase of her own career, tying together her current status as a pop auteur with her past full of challenging, experimental fray music.
Like any live music venue in New York City, The Dance had a lot to contend with in its fight for the right to life. U.S. Girls played a siren song on a cool, humid Tuesday night at the whitewashed Lafayette Street club (figuratively and literally whitewashed, from the hoards of Parsons and NYU students to the stark, white brick walls and ducts). Meghan Remy, maestro for the Toronto-based project that is U.S. Girls, is releasing Heavy Light on March 6, her fourth record under that moniker. She’s delivering taut, tension-filled sets on the supporting tour I witnessed across the street from the impressive Public Theater, a downtown landmark that stands just south of Astor Place.
By a strange coincidence, I attended an event at The Dance shortly after it opened last October. I noticed the lacquered floors near the main bar were pure silver glitter and shone with a deep intensity against the blood-red lights; tonight they looked more like television static, hazy and worn from a tempestuous life. So the club was closing — Manhattan years are roughly equivalent to dog years, and five months is a pretty good run — but the energy was electric, and the crowd just wanted to keep dancing. Remy, in turn, laid bare her soul on a small stage flanked by a (white) circular staircase leading to a very small opening in the (also white) ceiling. She swept through the evening with beautiful sincerity that rendered futile any attempt to divert from her mesmerizing, one-on-one gaze.
The set opened with a freshened twist on “State House (It’s a Man’s World)”, taken from the 2011 record U.S. Girls on KRAAK. Remy began her career as U.S. Girls in 2007 crafting gauzy, anti-stringent case studies on unsuspecting victims, rendering her records rife with a pungent schizophrenia that, coupled with the analog static permeating the songs, made the result a dizzying, dazzling display of what “punk” (or maybe “independent”) meant in the late aughts and early teens. Remy reinterpreted three previously recorded U.S. Girls tracks for Heavy Light (including “State House” and “Overtime”, the lead single) alluding to her rediscovery of herself that this record birthed. As the sultry, sanguine lights dimmed and the percussionists entered the stage via the circular staircase, they began the tantric drum sequence that opens “State House” and the rest of the band (three fierce, guitar-wielding female backup singers) shuffled down the stairs and opened the song with a herald. It was all too primed for Remy to strut down the stairs to the beat in her Canadian tuxedo and jazz shoes, looking like a refugee on an island that she wanted to quickly leave.
However uncomfortable she was, she used her time on stage to draw the room to contemplative silences and then brought the room to blistering dancehall highs, over and over. After her second song, she retreated back up the stairs and returned with a bouquet of chrysanthemums, announcing with a soberingly caustic tone: “It wouldn’t be a funeral without flowers”. Though The Dance was closing and she was sending the club to its grave, she seemed to acknowledge the irony of calling upon an against-the-grain, DIY Chicago native to give fanfare to a five-month-old downtown Manhattan club catering to wealthy twenty-somethings. “Too bad it’s closing. I never got the chance to come here, but it seems nice.”
After spinning back the clock to the funky slap and slinky crawl of standout “L-Over” from In a Poem Unlimited, she retreated a few steps and intoned a meditative breathing exercise to the audience — inhale, exhale, forgive, forget. As the silence permeated the room, someone in the front sporting a mullet gave a shout: C’mon girl! Let’s go, my heels are hurting! Remy singled him out and asked him to repeat his lament: “Wait, everyone, someone up here has something to say. What’s that, hun? Your heels are hurting? Oh, you’re not going to repeat it. Must not have been that important.” With that simple assertion, the tiny, introverted human standing before us gave a reason to see her as mighty; no one was going to sway her to a place of pandering, least of all a man.
Closing sans encore, Remy chose “Red Ford Radio”, a bizarre and absolutely transfixing slice from her 2010 cut Go Grey that’s also reinterpreted as the closing track on Heavy Light. Instrumentalists left the stage one-by-one till it was Remy, her lead backup vocalist, and one percussionist. As the two vocalists stood face-to-face and traded lyrics over a beat, the heat and intensity rose so quickly that it caused the entire room to drop to a whisper, like a tropical depression. The drummer dropped his sticks and exited, and it was only the two left on stage. U.S. Girls were gone now as quickly as they’d arrived, but cemented in the collective memory of the room that night was the atmosphere that Meghan Remy consciously set out to create.
As an American ex-pat that sings politically- and socially-motivated music oft aimed at the trappings of her former home country, she really did seem apathetic about playing such a trendy New York scene. The stage lights shone blood-red once more and the two women got ready to make their exit, and Remy unplugged her microphone and stuffed it into her shirt pocket. Before trapesing up the stairs one last time, the two vocalists sang the last refrain: I’d do anything to get out, get out.
