New Music: Bookends

           

Toronto-based artist Meg Remy records under the name U.S. Girls shares the lead single "Bookends" — a sprawling, twelve-minute ballad co-written with Edwin de Goeij — makes up the heart of the album "Scrach It." The lead single is a soulful 12-minute meditation on the loss of one of Meg Remy's friends, the late Power Trip frontman Riley Gale. The resulting song couldn't possibly sound less like Power Trip, but it salutes the group through lyrical reference. Meg Remy co-wrote "Bookends" with Edwin de Goeji, and it’s partly inspired by Remy looking at Gale’s loss through reference to Eyewitness To History, a book about people’s eyewitness accounts of historical events. Video director Caity Arthur, director says: The video is ultimately about death and absolution — how death is one of the only certain things in life; the “great equalizer,” nolens volens. However, it also subverts the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience or new beginning through a hallucinatory ensemble cast, a 1960s pop-star performance, and sleight of hand magic. As the video progresses, the TV channels alternate through these scenes as Meg's lyrics evoke death in its various forms.