venturing - Ghostholding (2025) [Hi-Res]

A new album by the artist aka Jane Remover is full of sprawling, fearsome beauty, both compositionally tighter and texturally coarser than their past forays into rock.

When there’s nothing all around you, you might need to make a lot of noise to fill it up. There are so many kinds of nothing in this world and so many kinds of noise. In physical space, there are just over 150 miles between the tree on the cover of 1000 Gecs (543 E Algonquin Rd., Des Plaines, IL) and the house on the cover of the first American Football album (704 W High St., Urbana, IL). It might take you less than three hours to drive from one to the other if you don’t get stuck in Chicago, where three major interstates knot together. Jane Remover grew up in New Jersey, not Illinois, but in 2023 they talked about moving to Chicago, and anyway most American interstices share a common parlance. The only highway Remover mentions on the first album they’ve made under the name venturing is I-15, which courses from San Diego up through Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City before terminating in a town called Sweet Grass at the northern edge of Montana. In 2020, 65 people lived in Sweet Grass. On their 2021 track “Seventeen,” Jane Remover sang, “Wish I could escape this shitty place.” It’s easy enough to escape a place, harder to ditch the shit. As Jason Molina sang on an album he recorded in Chicago, “Why put a new address on the same old loneliness?”