The Loved Ones - EP

juno

This little EP caught my eye because it was executive produced by none other than Jane Remover, who if you didn't know, came out last year with one of the most interesting, fantastical, genre-bending pop experiences I've heard in recent memory. There's so little I know about them, and they're such a unique artist that I really just want to hear anything by them at this point. So I threw myself into the brief foray into emo pop-rap that is juno's The Loved Ones. While it certainly does have Jane Remover's fingerprints all over the instrumentals here, I really could not get into this one. This is unfortunately due to juno's vocals. They're pretty flat, not very emotive, and quite uninteresting. There's a light application of auto-tune thrown on to his voice but the threshold is so low that it's not really correcting his pitch. Instead it will occasionally latch on to his voice and give it this unflattering digital robotic texture that is really not doing him any favours. Also, the vocal mix is terribly forward at times. They're way louder than the instrumental, a little on the dry side, and as a result, they just don't seem to mesh along to the music.

This puts a lot of pressure on Jane Remover to come up with some great instrumentals, which he does for the most part, but not without a few issues. Opening track, La Fleur, begins with a neat midi piano line - very similar to what you would hear on Frailty - but once that heavy digital beat drops, it begins to feel a little cheap. The instrumental for I Know Something They Don't just sounds like a snippet was taken directly from Jane Remover's Search Party and then they called it a day. The two instrumentals I really liked on here were Downhill and Perfect. The former is a cool digicore instrumental with subtle glitch elements, while the latter has an early 2000s post-grunge sound. Now I know that might conjure awful memories of Staind and Creed, but I must say, I really do like all the acoustic guitar melodies and I kinda like the lo-fi sound it has, as if it was captured via direct input. Unfortunately though, whatever elements I enjoy about the instrumentals is greatly overshadowed by the dull vocal performances. The Loved Ones as it turns out just isn't for me.