Lives is the new live album from U.S. Girls. To be released on the eve of a European tour, this album showcases the last five years of the U.S. Girls project on stage, offering an example of what Paste Magazine meant when they called U.S. Girls the best live band on the planet.
Meg Remy is an anomaly. Over the course of the last 15 years, her U.S. Girls project has morphed, transposed and transmuted through it’s various forms to produce a catalogue with a depth and breadth that is unparalleled within her generation. From her early experiments with tape machines in 2007 through to recent iterations of the U.S. Girls live band, Meg has continued present audiences with live interpretations of her compositions that possess the power to astound, enlighten, challenge and inspire in equal measure.
Live albums possess a peculiar spot in the larger cannon of pop music history. Albums like Alive! By Kiss, Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy Mercy! Live at “The Club”, or Frampton Comes Alive! intended to bring the experience of a live concert into the homes of music fans. In reality, these records often gathered recordings from different venues on different nights and utilized the cutting edge in record production technology to arrange, shape and present the raw material into a listening experience that combined the best of both worlds. U.S. Girls’ Lives belongs within this lineage, compiling and presenting multiple iterations of the group over a span of five years as though it were a single concert. Remy’s husband and long time musical collaborator, Maximilian Turnbull combed through several years worth of archival material to produce and present this set.
Lives is very much about the alchemy between a large roster of musical talent.
Featuring members the Badge Époque Ensemble and the Cosmic Range along with some of the brightest Canadian singer-songwriter talent in artists like Geordie Gordon, Dorothea Paas and Carlyn Bezic, Remy largely pulled from a pool of Toronto based musicians active in the seemingly disparate worlds of jazz, funk, pop and the avantgarde.
The musicians on this album represent three distinct versions of the U.S. Girls live band; the “Poem Band”, a jam-oriented outsider jazz-funk unit that often stretched Remy’s deep-pocketed groovers and plastic soul ballads out the nether-regions of abstraction, the “Heavy Light Band” which reigned in the chaos and placed emphasis on harmonious sounds of stacked female voices and the current iteration of the U.S. Girls band which utilizes synthesizers and samplers to bring a new dimension and depth of tone to her catalogue.
But of course, there is also that voice. The timeless timbre of Remy’s voice is truly the centerpiece of this album. Like the great doo-wop and pop vocalists of the AM radio era that she calls her biggest influences, her vocals soar, sear and slice through speakers with a masterful degree of control and immeasurable depth of emotion. Her skill as a social improviser is also evidenced by moments of stage banter and her interaction with the other musicians and vocalists sharing her stage.
The Live experience ebbs and flows just like the real thing. Between the explosive disco firecrackers of opening track M.A.H. and the 12 minute rendition of “Time” that closes the album, the listener is exposed to moments of high drama (IOU, Bless This Mess, Red Ford Radio), fuzz-soaked glam rock swagger (Incidental Boogie, 28 Days) and interplanetary dancefloor exploration (Pearly Gates, Window Shades). Over the course of these 15 songs and 80 minutes there is a marriage of rock and roll theatricality and undeniable funk that brings to mind mid-70s bowie in all of his Dionysian glory.
It’s a show not to be missed.
