Jane Inc. - Faster Than I Can Take (2022) Hi Res

"Feels like I'm made of glass," Carlyn Bezic sings over a tumbling, harmonic guitar riff on "Pummelled Into Sand," the closing song of Faster Than I Can Take. "Like I could cut you, or you could break me in half." It's a double-edged statement about the power that comes from inhabiting your vulnerability, a complicated truth expressed so beautifully it seems almost simple. Making the impossible look easy has always been Bezic's musical M.O. Faster Than I Can Take is her sophomore album as Jane Inc., a solo project forged after years of building her bona fides in the Toronto music scene with groups like U.S. Girls, Darlene Shrugg and acclaimed dance-pop duo Ice Cream. 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.