21 year-old singer-songwriter reminds everyone of the 90s more than the Clueless video…
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Megan Harrington: A generation of young goths is totally going to reach puberty to this song.
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Alfred Soto: Why she didn’t arrange this as a spooky-awesome house track mystifies me; she couldn’ve had a “Send Me an Angel” on her hands. The resulting Hunger Games-meets-PJ-Harvey hysterics will fool male critics who think Chrissie Hynde is awesome because she said “fuck.”
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Katherine St Asaph: In the female singer-songwriter taxonomy, Meg Myers is of a certain class: the ones the press compares to PJ Harvey, though really they’ve as much in common with NIN. (Sometimes it’s explicit, as in Kym Brown’s “Milk and Honey”: “Maybe I’m too emotional / when you fuck me from behind like an animal”; sometimes it’s a matter of collaborations, like Carina Round working with Puscifer.) The sonic palette’s one of slow-burn guitar, harpsichord, industrial percussion and synths; the voices are roared and only fragile in the sense that they’re frayed; the lyrics tend to be explicit, desire as a barbed and craggy thing; and all of these tend to be fetishized or dismissed. (I just read this essay on critics getting Gaitskill wrong; it’s much the same thing.) “Desire” has atmosphere and death-drive and a big central lyrical knife-twist in “I hope you feed me,” the kind of line whose second meaning you’re lulled into missing. A waiter can feed you; in another way, so can a carcass.
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Brad Shoup: “How do you want me?” In a needle? In the chamber? The track crawls on brittle strings, like a Maynard James song o’ devotion. He prolly would’ve demanded more weight on the piano though, and angrier guitar stings. I’d be happy if she’d gone full predator. And lost the bridge.
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Anthony Easton: The Sturm und Drang of this, as cannibalistic and ritualistic as a good high mass, as teenage-melodramatic as All Ages Night at the goth club, collapses under its own ambition. But when it grows up it might be Karen O before she became sentimental, or PJ Harvey circa 1996.
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Patrick St. Michel: “Creepy” needs to be subtle, not Meg Myers singing “I want to skin you with my tongue/I’m going to kill you/I’m going to lay you in the ground.”
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Iain Mew: I often love songs that combine stripped-back musical heaviness with showy personal drama, and this reminds me of several of my favourites. Myers sounds like an Emilie Autumn less hung up on Victoriana, while the bass piano clangs heighten a resemblance to Dresden Dolls back when Amanda Palmer regularly tapped into something big other than Amanda Palmer’s ego. Anna Calvi had her own excellent raw “Desire”. I can’t think of male comparisons as apt, but I guess there’s less urge to forefront your ostentatious craziness if you’re less likely to be dismissed as crazy regardless. Crazy is definitely where the verses of “Desire” go, progressing with vivid aplomb from “touch you” to “fuck you” to “kill you”, but the chorus adds a different depth. When it comes to really letting loose, Meg doesn’t howl more desires but “how do you want me?” A ploy to get to a position where she can do what she wants? Flipping the rest of the song to have all been a show for the subject? A question hoping against hope that the answer will be “skin me with your tongue, please”? I don’t know, but the portrayal and questions of desire for desire stick with me.
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