Bless This Mess

It’s somehow arguably her most wide-ranging album (stylistically and topically) while also feeling remarkably of a piece; succinct even.

While the lack of fixed personnel gives the album a gloriously freewheeling mixtape feel, Remy’s lyrics and persona in these songs, – particularly the wondrous title track and the miraculous “Tux” – demonstrate both a sleep deprived hunger for changes of spiritual and musical trajectory – sometimes within a single song – but also a recurrent return to elemental, physical needs, and the sheer lambent wonder of the grooves and hooks always keeps you rapt. [Mar 2023, p.60]

These songs find her shaping her thoughts on motherhood, romance, the universe, and death into some of the most accessible music of her career, telling the tales of our bodies and what comes after in a mesh of psychedelic funk and earworm hooks.

If it is a mess, it’s a glorious one.

At once a joyous, celebratory ode to motherhood, elsewhere finding quiet liberation and acceptance during life’s darkest moments, it’s clear, Meg Remy has delivered her most hopeful album yet.

Bless This Mess feels like a rebirth; a boundless, alien take on Remy's explosive art-pop, its conceptual wildness and sonic friskiness allowing her to flex her vision and sense of humour in brand new ways.

Bless This Mess is another chapter of U.S. Girls' consistent evolution marked by pristine production and a deft balance of hooks and soul-baring beauty, with Remy pulling off the feat of intertwining some of her most emotionally complex material with what might be her most accessible sounds yet.

It’s also a disco-funk explosion, ecstatic from every direction. Even when the satire wanes, the potency of the music remains. Like the rest of the album, Remy shakes free her sorrows and stretches loose her limbs, sanguine as she moves across the dancefloor.

With the genre-hopping feel of a high-concept mixtape, Bless This Mess calls on a wide cast of collaborators. [Apr 2023, p.38]

Remy’s new tracks are more slickly produced, built around retro and upbeat sounds.

Bless This Mess splits the difference between Remy’s last two outings. Considerably more focused than 2020’s Heavy Light, but also foregoing the scuzzy charms of 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited.

Her more experimental material can be heavier going: the sparkling funk of Pump’s first half gives way to an interminable coda that’s far more annoying than clever.

She’s certainly an artist following her own vision: one which may sometimes grate, but is never less than intriguing.