Frailty

Jane Remover

I stumbled upon Jane Remover by happenstance in a twitch stream last week and was fairly intrigued by what I heard. As it turned out, this album took up a great deal of my music listening time this past week. It's a fairly dense listen with lots of ideas being thrown at you, but with each listen, I felt that a new layer, more magic, was revealed. At its core, Frailty is a hyperpop album, however, it is unlike any other hyperpop I've heard before thanks to its unique and plentiful blend of different genres. Fantastical EDM, crazy glitch freakouts, auto-crooned balladry, bouts of harsh noise, dashes of synth prog virtuosity, and pop-punk inspired drum arrangements, vocal melodies, and bass breakdowns; not an expansive list of everything the record has to offer, but should give you an idea of what we're dealing with. When it comes to the lyrics, Jane Remover tends to go a little emo, relaying feelings of not being good enough, feeling like a burden, always feeling like you're in someone's way, and they are delivered in this stream of consciousness brain dump. It's not the most eloquent, but it seems personal and honest.

The record's achilles heel is unfortunately the vocals. They're a little timid, lacking in personality, and the melodies are pretty predictable. This becomes immediately noticeable on the opening track, goldfish, which features Jane Remover's most shaky and sleepy performance. With an equally clumsy and lo-fi guitar performance, this album doesn't really put it's best foot forward. Luckily, the rest of the vocal performances are marginally better, and bolstered by some stunning and adventurous instrumentation.

While I truly enjoy pretty much every track from that point on, there are a few that stuck out to me. pretender is like a soothing space dream with star-beam synthesizers flying all around. I love the subtle percussion and how the instrumentation gets grittier and more distorted as the track progresses, like witnessing a supernova. kodak moment is an incredible journey in three parts. The choruses are quite grand with these grainy walls of synths and shimmering leads, and all the vocals are doubled up, enhancing the poppiness of the track. The second phase of this track is where this album starts to take a drastic turn, and this comes in the form of a full blown glitch freakout that is incredibly exhilarating. The song closes with a much needed cool down; some calming pianos later joined by some midi sounding electric pianos and a flute melody that is later reprised on the final track, let's go home. These hardcore digital edits and glitchy passages remain to be a staple on many tracks in the back half, of which how to lie is another favourite. It begins with a much stronger midi guitar driven ballad (compared to goldfish) and has some great delay effects that ping pong sounds all over the place. After that we get another digital hardcore section with what sounds like some sped up metal passages chopped to pieces. I love the percussion on this track too, incorporating both sped up jungle beats and a double timed punk beat at the end.

Frailty turned out to be a very impressive experience. I can hear so many different inspirations coming together to create a very unique sound for hyperpop, a genre that is rapidly becoming quite saturated. Really, the only thing I would liked to have seen more of was more vocal diversity and some more confident performances. I don't think this is a big ask given a few really good vocal spots here. I get the feeling that Jane Remover is downplaying his vocal capabilities a little. In any case, I would love to hear more from this mysterious talent. For anyone curious to give this a shot, I would say that the appeal is not very immediate, but if you give it an honest shot, I think you may see the charm.