U.S. Girls @ Cafe Oto - 1 March (or: spot the musical references)

Other than the name might imply, U.S. Girls is the moniker used by just one American girl, who also goes by the name of Megan Remy. Her sophomore album Go Grey, which came out just last year, managed to attract some positive reviews, enough to get her on a plane to play some shows on this side of the Atlantic. Whilst listening to said album, it’s almost unbelievable to imagine that all that noise is produced by a single person, in stead of an entire army of people banging away at anything that might produce some kind of sound. Not that it’s just chaos: Megan Remy manages to interweave vocals that sound almost like plain pop music at times with pounding drumbeats and haunting keyboard melodies.

But before U.S. girls can enter the stage, there are some support acts who are also eager to show what they’re capable of. First up is Heatsick, a project that, according their website, “is focused on repetition, as a means of creating abstraction, improvising with organic variations of a theme, yet embracing the artificial to facilitate a psychedelic mind shift”. Heatsick does as this maybe somewhat pretentious instruction manual says. Over and over and over and over. Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal. Oh wait, that’s another band. Well, the joy of repetition is obviously in Heatsick, but the resulting music might be just a bit too monotonous to result in any kind of mind shift, whether psychedelic or not.

Time are next up to take the stage. It’s only the duo’s second performance as a twosome ever, but if they hadn’t explicitly mentioned that little fact, no one would have noticed. The duo combine a seemingly limitless array of instruments to create some hazy post-rock that is vaguely reminiscent of the XX who’ve lost their drum machine, but then even darker and just a bit more scary. The variety in instruments is certainly welcome at this point, but this time it might just be a bit too incoherent to really make the set as a whole work. Maybe they just need a bit less post rock, as now the build up seems to take forever, but the songs never take off. 

As opposed to the support acts, U.S. Girls has already found the balance between repetition and variety. Megan Remy manages to fill the room completely with just her drum machine, synthesizers and voice; except for the part where she is shortly thwarted by a power outage on stage. As a true professional though, she just continues her set, like no one even noticed the sudden lack of drum beats and noise. When she uses the voice transformer on some of her songs, she sounds like Karin Dreijer Anderson’s (she of Fever Ray and The Knife) angry little sister: melodic, but brooding and with a certain ghostly demeanour.

Those melodies are more often than not immerged in multiple layers of noise, which suddenly subside to expose something that could almost be described as pop. Surprisingly maybe, pop and noise seem to harmonise pretty well in this instance, leading to an interesting set, and some possible mind shifting here. It might not be as spell binding as the earlier mentioned Fever Ray, but U.S. Girls certainly make for a memorable night of music.