“Bless this mess” is the sort of cliché you might find on a coffee mug. As an album title, it could be employed earnestly or with a wink, but Meghan Remy seems to want it both ways, as she flips between sincerity and irony across her eighth album as U.S. Girls. These conflicting approaches end up negating one another and result in a work that sign-posts its themes and musical choices but lacks a coherent overall vision.
The title track, a treacly, piano-driven motivational ballad, certainly seems to be performed in earnest, as Remy predictably takes stock of broken dreams and aging. It’s also indicative of Bless This Mess’s broader, if half-hearted, attempts at exploring existential dread and finding the commonalities between people through mortality: “Everyone’s a baby at the start of this run,” Remy coos, leaning into a middle-American, almost Americana affectation.
Like “Futures Bet,” which features the pat refrain “Nothing is wrong/Everything is fine/This is just life,” you might think that this seemingly interminable album’s ostensible nuggets of wisdom were being spun in a knowing way if they weren’t accompanied by such po-faced melodies. There’s no twist of dissonance or counterbalancing edge in earshot.
Bless This Mess’s tonal disconnect is best exemplified by its closing track, “Pump,” which begins as a groovy ode to motherhood—referencing the birth of Remy’s twins, whom she humorously claims emerged immediately demanding milk—before grinding to a halt as Remy spells out the album’s core themes of “bodies, birth, death, machines” in painfully literal spoken word. The sudden dip into faux-philosophizing, as well as Remy repeatedly addressing her audience with a histrionic “you…you….you…you,” is especially cloying given the song’s promising first half.
Occasionally, Remy’s go-for-broke gambits strike a nice balance between goofiness and self-awareness, as on “Tux,” a balls-to-the-wall disco-funk extravaganza that veers into Bruno Mars-style karaoke funk but whose narrative is so absurd that it’s almost endearing. Remy sings from the perspective of a tuxedo hanging in a lover’s closet, “custom fit to make you feel legit.” The song segues into self-consciousness by the fact that the cultural origins of the arrangement and instrumentation—including vocoder, a panoply of synths, and organ—are accentuated by Remy’s description of the suit’s fabric: “I’m black and I’m white.”
Elsewhere on Bless This Mess, Remy’s wild ideas rely on wackiness for its own sake. “RIP Roy G Biv” takes the perspective of a rainbow as a lover (“Roy G Biv, a gentleman’s gentleman”) and its glacial clip brings its strained metaphor into focus. Both that song and the pandemic-inspired ditty “Screen Face” are meandering duets whose male counterparts—Michael Rault and Marker Starling, respectively—play Blake Sennett to Remy’s Jenny Lewis. Which is to say, they detract and distract from the much more talented lead vocalist.
Bless This Mess is tailor-made for our dance music-obsessed era, but while its occasionally propulsive, the sonic busy-ness that was a pleasure in U.S. Girls’s previous work is here coupled with thematic subject matter and genre diversions that feel ill-suited to its creator’s talents.
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