The Clamorous Life

U.S. Girls' big dreams and strange adventures in lo-fi.

by Patrick Rapa

Jessica Kourkounis

Meghan Remy chose Philadelphia.

Armed with a magic counterfeit Greyhound ticket, she crisscrossed the U.S. and Canada for three months in 2008, playing rock shows and looking for a new place to call home. Would it be the lazy left coast? Big, beautiful, clichéd New York? Montreal? Toronto?

She recalls the day she had some time to herself in Philadelphia, walking around Center City. At Broad and Chestnut she heard a voice singing to her from across the street. The singer was mainstay street performer Sonny Forriest Jr. Perhaps you've seen him around? He serenades passers-by with a microphone and speakers attached to his motorized wheelchair.

The song was "What's Your Name," a 1962 doo-wop classic by Don and Juan. It's one of Remy's favorites.

They talked for a while and by the time they went their separate ways it was settled in her mind. Philly won the sweepstakes.

A young veteran of the music scenes in both her native Chicago and Portland, Ore., Remy performs under the curiously plural moniker U.S. Girls. The "band" is just her and a whole mess of equipment: microphones, a busted drum machine, a failing four-track, an old reel-to-reel player and other less-than-cutting-edge electronic devices. Her songs are noisy, hazy things. Ghostly and all but incoherent, her voice rises and falls beneath thick layers of distortion and snippets of white noise. There are hints and glimmers of recognizable rock conventions — a little bit of pop energy, an occasional catchy chorus — but it's pretty safe to say U.S. Girls is not for everyone.

The catch-all label that fits here is "lo-fi," although there are few stylistic similarities among the many bands and artists that get sorted that way. Suicide, a synth-punk duo that got its start with a few messy albums in the 1970s, is one of the earliest and most influential lo-fi groups. These days, garage bands with fuzzed-out vocals like No Age, Times New Viking and Pissed Jeans get the tag.

"I think U.S. Girls can be put into a subgenre within the female 'bliss' movement," says KPC, a DJ at Princeton's free-form radio station WPRB. He points to artists like LA Vampires, Psychic Reality and Pocahaunted. "The thing that separates U.S. Girls from this crowd, however, is her harsher sounds and use of extreme delay and echo." She goes for gritty and low-tech, not pretty.

For her part, Remy says she feels little philosophical kinship with her contemporaries. She's really into Springsteen and '60s girl-groups.

"I don't think lo-fi means anything if you don't have good songs, or something else going on," she says over cigarettes and a mug of red wine in her Powelton Village apartment. "Who wants to listen to static?"

Since 1989, Tom Lax has run siltbreeze Records out of his residence on South Seventh Street. It's a small but revered indie label that's released music by a number of lo-fi notables including The Dead C, Monkey 101, Guided By Voices and more recently Times New Viking and Pink Reason. Lax first heard U.S. Girls on "Art for Spastics," a mixed-bag radio show on KDVS in Davis, Calif. He did a little Web searching and was soon hooked.

"She's got a terrific voice. That initial track I heard was a cover of Springsteen's 'Prove It All Night' which she's reconstructed so it almost sounded like Suicide doing it. But her original material was the same; very cool and sparse, synthetic with a great use of a rhythm or drum machine. And then you add her singing over that, I dunno, she just struck me as an artist I'd want to work with."

So he did. Before even meeting Remy (born Meghan Uremovich), Lax put out her first LP, Introducing, on Siltbreeze in 2008. Last month they followed it up with Go Grey. Music by U.S. Girls also turns up on singles and compilations put out by even smaller labels. You're at least as likely to find her on vinyl, or even cassette, as you are a compact disc.

Remy likes the distinct physicality of vinyl, and the warm sound. "CDs are digital," she sighs in her charming Chicago accent. "It's a laser. You know, I don't know nothing about lasers." She gets up several times during our interview to choose and flip records.

There's a utilitarian, almost low-tech vibe to many aspects of Remy's life, whether it's by choice or necessity.

She doesn't own a computer, so she goes to the library to check her e-mail and borrow movies and books. Somewhere along the way her DVD player's remote control got lost; she and her boyfriend/roommate have small piles of borrowed VHS tapes piled near the TV.

Compared to some of the sketchy apartments she had in Chicago, where she grew up, her current place is pretty sweet: OK neighborhood, nobody close enough to complain about noise, no inside walls but plenty of room. Still, she had to talk the landlord down on price a little. Right now she's working two jobs, at a bakery and a record store, and financial issues seem to be in the background of many of her creative decisions. To hear her tell it, her music wouldn't be quite so lo-fi if she could afford to do it up right.

For the time being, she's kinda stuck with the $10 fixer-upper guitar she got at a Goodwill in South Philly, the hand-me-down four-track recorder that sometimes behaves like a three-track, the drum machine with the broken output jack, forcing her to hold a mic up to its built-in speakers. None of her equipment adds robotic bleeps, or loops her sound. For shows, she prerecords tapes to sing and manipulate feedback over, with her mass of wires and effects pedals laid out on a table.

The table is a new addition; until recently she simply crouched down on the floor, hunched over, almost hiding inside the sound and behind the equipment and the headphones. "I became bipedal a few months ago," she says with a laugh. "'Cause you sing a lot better when you aren't in a crumpled mess on the floor. You can project."

So far everything she's recorded has been in her bedroom, wherever that bedroom may be. But she would like to move on to a studio. "I wanna sound like Tom Petty," she says. "I would love to make a record that was clear."

That's why she's working her ass off this summer, to save money for a computer and, hopefully, some studio time with a full band. "Again it just comes down to financial kind of things. ... I can use the Internet and Photoshop, I'm sure I can figure out how to use the goddamn Garage Band or something."

Jessica Kourkounis

Bruce Springsteen's "Prove It All Night," from his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, is a rollicking rock song about young lovers on the run. It's got room for pounding pianos, a quick saxophone bridge and a blazing guitar solo.

U.S. Girls does a version of "Prove It All Night" on 2008's Introducing, and it's pretty much unrecognizable. A percussive clang goes boom boom-boom for the entire two minutes while Remy's strong, spectral voice hovers overtop, but also reverberates as if at the other end of a subway tunnel. Thin hisses and breaths materialize and disappear periodically.

If this version shares anything with the original, it's a sense of desperation for its two protagonists. "But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn't that be nice/ But this ain't no dream we're living through tonight." That's what Springsteen sings in the original. In the U.S. Girls version, individual words are difficult to make out. Instead, it's the mood that gets the urgency across. You have to feel it.

Makes you wonder what the Boss would think, if he heard it. Remy did try to track him down and give him a copy once. She was on a tour stop in Atlanta when she heard her idol was recording what would become Magic at a studio not far away. She drove out there only to be told he'd left for the weekend. Instead she had to settle for seeing his guitar and dropping off a burned CD of her music.

"I was expecting to get a call like, 'This is Bruce. I heard your cover we gotta work together,'" she laughs. "He loves weird shit! He covered Suicide."

Which brings up an interesting point: Remy knows her shit is weird. She's sung and played drums, guitar and bass in normal, or more normal bands (among them: Me Con, Hustler White, Silver Crème), when she lived in Chicago and Portland. She's toured all over North America and Europe, and weathered more than a few puzzled reactions in rock clubs.

"It's different making a record when you know an individual's gonna get it," she says. "Playing live you have to get your point across immediately to a group of people." For her, music-making is a solitary thing, something she does alone, and indeed it can sound lonely.

"She's clearly worked out things in a very distinct vocabulary based on some simplistic, an almost ghetto variety of experimentalism," observes Brian Turner, a DJ and music director at WFMU in Jersey City.

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"The way it's made is how it comes out on record, or live. I hate to say it's all self-contained, but she definitely knows how to instantly take you to that place and its portability is an asset to it. There's a simplistic means of making this big foggy soundscape she sings and plays through."

And she's played through them a lot. Just back from a two-month tour across France, Britain, Sweden and Italy, Remy says she's never said no to a chance to hit the road, often piggybacking on a friend's band and tour. It's often been an improvised thing, booking and playing shows on the fly.

"Now I'm just feeling more strategic about things. And not just about being a road warrior anymore."

"I don't know if I would do a full U.S. tour ever again. It's just not financially viable," she says. "Unless you're like Animal Collective or something, you don't make money and you just get sick and come home broke."

And then there's the small matter of being understood, finding an audience that's into what she's doing. U.S. Girls isn't so alien that these songs — ostensibly about love, crime and observational politics — couldn't hook an open-minded listener.

On the other side of all those lo-fi snaps and crackles, just past the blown-out vocals and muted notes, you just might find a soul singer.

"I wanna be, like, the Supremes. But there's no way I can be the Supremes. I don't have the equipment that those people were using, none of the instruments they were playing. Or that kind of recording equipment. I'm not from that time period. I can't write the way Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote. I can't do that stuff but," she pauses, "I'm trying the best way that I know how to try to convey my dream music."

(pat@citypaper.net)

U.S. Girls plays Wed., April 14, 8 p.m., $5-$10 suggested donation, with Mi Ami, Hot Guts and My Mind, Danger Danger Gallery, 5013 Baltimore Ave., myspace.com/dangerdangergallery.