catalogue

JANE INC.

FASTER THAN I CAN TAKE (TELEPHPONE EXPLOSION)

JANE INC. - FASTER THAN I CAN TAKE 152027
format:
1 LP
release:
06.05.2022
label:
TELEPHPONE EXPLOSION
item ID:
152027
barcode:
0844667052596
Pitchfork called Jane Inc's first album, 2020's Number One, "dazzling... [Bezic] proves herself a musical Swiss Army knife, capable of anything and revelling in her multiplicity." On Faster Than I Can Take, she uses all the tools at her disposal - a Prince-like ability to shred harmonic guitar riffs over deep, danceable grooves, an eagerness to experiment with form, and lyricism that seamlessly links the personal and the political - to focus the multifaceted energy of Number One into something completely singular.

A disco-inflected, danceable meditation on the permeable boundaries between our interior and exterior worlds, Faster Than I Can Take is an album that you can listen to at a party or alone in your apartment - but no matter where you listen, it will make you dance.

On lead single "Contortionists," Bezic's voice floats over a landscape of spare, warping synths and ethereal backing vocals from Dorothea Paas (U.S.

Girls, Badge Epoque Ensemble), seeming at first to sketch out a familiar pandemic scene: "The laws of time have changed / months pass in minutes, hours feel like days." But as the melody begins to swirl and bend back over itself, a deeper theme creeps in.

"At first I thought I was making a record about time," Bezic explains, "but I was actually making a record about how, in moments of intense anxiety, you're living in the past, present and future at the same time.

A million moments existing at once, real and imagined." By the time the song drops into a ticking groove, you know exactly what she means.

Many of the songs on Faster Than I Can Take work this way - taking concepts that feel intimately interior and expanding them into something universal.

Songs like the moody, bass-heavy title track, or the bright, searing "Pummelled Into Sand," where a Hendrix-like guitar solo runs under Bezic's voice like a third rail, deal with what Bezic calls "the pain of change and growth." "Human Being" and "Dancing With You" (whose bridge features the catchiest meditation break you've ever heard in a dance-pop song), explore the psychedelic melding of individual and collective worlds that can come from fantasizing about performance while alone in your house, or connecting to a group of strangers through your computer screen.

In "An Ordinary Thing," Bezic contemplates the complexities of wanting to create anything - art, or even a family - against the backdrop of the Anthropocene.

"Someone please take this from me / this feeling, this need," she sings, the tension audible in her voice.

But in the next track, the irresistibly danceable "2120," that anxiety turns into powerful resolve: "I'll pour my grief into this plastic crucible / Forge a new infinite fuel made of anger, and hope, and refusal," she sings against a driving, determined beat.

That determination is what makes Faster Than I Can Take unlike anything else you've heard this year - a work of art that refuses to either wallow in the difficulties of contemporary life or ignore them in favour of escapist fantasy.
 
  • Tracklisting
  • 1.1. CONTORTIONISTS
  • 1.2. HUMAN BEING
  • 1.3. PICTURE THE FUTURE
  • 1.4. EVERY RIP
  • 1.5. AN ORDINARY THING
  • 1.6. 2120
  • 1.7. FASTER THAN I CAN TAKE
  • 1.8. DANCING WITH YOU
  • 1.9. PUMMELLED INTO SAND