Meg Myers Speaks a Cold and Distant Truth

Meg Myers, TZIA

I needed longer than usual to embrace Meg Myers’ third LP-length album, not because of the music, but because of her amended image. Her previous albums foregrounded her beauty, but in ways that subverted White Euro-American standards. Her redesign into a strange, Star Trek-like dominatrix, seemed too abrupt. Then somebody reminded me of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album, with its body horror-influenced art, and I finally glimpsed Myers’ intent.

Like Bowie, Myers has apparently decided to periodically reinvent herself to ensure that she, and her audience, never become complacent. This new image accompanies Myers’ rejection of the “Big Sad” character she’s previously played. This album contains several songs explicitly declaring how she’s no longer beholden to the demons from her past. Which is personally empowering, sure; but as art, this album feels more like a TED Talk than music.

Several tracks have lyrics so declarative, I can only call them thesis statements. Lines like “I know the truth is inside of me, I hold the key” (from “A New Society”) or “A call for all the people, Who stand for what is right, From different places, We all unite” (from “Sophia <144>”) bespeak the energy Myers wants to convey. She’s no longer content describing her pains from a personal, introspective angle. She’d rather unify listeners in rebellion against the conditions that made those pains possible.

This puts me, the listener, in an awkward position. I respect the hippie-esque protest anthem motivation. Pop music has a long history of demanding the world do better, that it show more respect to those most abused by our culture and economy. Many of these songs, written in a very square 4/4 time, are perfect for marching on public squares and national monuments. Myers clearly wants to create a pop-art manifesto for a post-Me-Too world.

Yet something feels missing. Most tracks have a synth-driven background with a programmed percussion track—the personnel list names a human drummer on only two songs. This results in hypnotic, looping rhythms on most songs, like a heavier ‘Hearts of Space” trance. Looking back on classic protest songs, like “Peace Train” or “Fortunate Son,” these songs shared an important quality: audiences could sing along. That’s far harder here.

Meg Myers

Myers’ thesis statements are well-grounded, mostly. She decries the ways culture moralistically controls women’s sexuality, while ironically foregrounding sex, with lines like “Victimized, I’ve been tied to bedposts” (from “Me”). She excoriates the ways women, including herself, manage men’s emotions for so long that they become deaf to their own needs, in “My Mirror.” The song “Searching For the Truth” begins with the self-explanatory lines:

Everybody’s hiding from their fears
Spinning in their cycles all alone
With a hand over one eye
Disconnected pieces of a whole

I appreciate these messages, which would arguably make good stump speeches. But since Myers tells us how to receive her songs directly in the lyrics, and we’d struggle to sing along with her trance-inducing rhythms, I struggle to understand why she wrote them as songs. She isn’t inviting us listeners on a journey, she’s lecturing to us based on her hard-won experience. Basically she’s channeling her inner indie-pop Rebecca Solnit.

As a result, this album’s most intensely felt song is probably the only one she didn’t co-write. When I saw the title “Numb” on the track listing, I assumed she’d re-recorded her own song of the same title. Nope, she’s covered Linkin Park’s icky 2003 hate-lust anthem, possibly on a dare. Her understated arrangement here serves her message, as a synth drone and Myers herself on harp create a disconnected, ethereal soundscape. The collision with the original version is palpable.

In the decade since her first EP, Myers has reinvented herself constantly. Among other things, she’s shaved her head after each album tour. She’s given conflicting reviews of her earliest recordings, sometimes claiming she was constrained and controlled, other times claiming her collaborations with Andrew Rosen and Atlantic Records brought her to technical musical maturity. Maybe that explains this album’s line: “It’s time to give yourself all of the love you’ve been missing.”

Despite what I’ve said, this album does have admirable songs. Tracks like “Bluebird” and “Waste of Confetti” stop the lecturing tone and instead invite listeners on Myers’ unique journey. But they don’t come together to create an album the way her previous two LPs did. Perhaps this is a transitional album. I’ve previously felt drawn to Meg Myers’ personal, confessional lyric style. Sadly, it feels she’s now holding us at arm’s length.