‘Census Designated’ pulls in shoegaze and noise rock curtains that instill crushing noise and glitch at every turn. Musically does not end up becoming spectacular, but Jane Remover’s raw songwriting flair will still pull you in for the cautious, undulating brutality of a project.
The past few years of Jane Remover’s ongoing impenetrable presence cannot be emphasized enough, sticking through her digicore and hyperpop stilts that she unfolds through her past couple of projects, whether that be her first two projects ‘Teen Week’ and ‘Frailty’ that composes pops of bit-crushed layers with various styles and dynamics, even adding dance textures on her debut project. And talking about dance textures, she magnifies it down to her very own ‘dariacore’ genre parsed under her leroy pseudonym, bringing a kaleidoscope of electronic dance rhythms that shreds everything apart and compiles them to a brain-frying result. Yet, ‘Census Designated’ proved to be something easy to quantify yet tougher to have a sit-through, the grandest sonic departure for Jane Remover’s signature style.
Through the one-hour length of this very project, Jane Remover veers away from her sonic roots to delve into the fractured feedbacks of noise rock and shoegaze that provides an overall expansive atmosphere, pulling in more blasts of guitars and drums as well as letting her tender voice step into the forefront. This backdrop emboldens and casts its walls of sound with overwhelming layers through its most effervescent and crushing notes. Opener ‘Cage Girl / Camgirl’ is imbued with these lilting blankets of shoegaze softness, rendering the 5-minute length of the track to swoon amidst Jane Remover’s vocals. It sets what would perhaps be the overall tone of the album, an expectation that breaks apart immediately due to the noise rock elements parched in the project. Despite the sonic shifts, the electronic staples Jane Remover experimented with back then are clipped onto every distorted knockback of these tracks, presented through the barrage of glitchy textures that shamble the fractured moments even more. Yet those moments can be the project’s weakest moments, not helped out by the distorted blasts and vocal processings of Jane Remover’s evocative voice that dulls out the tunes that are pretty glacial and do not exactly soar the way they should. ‘Census Designated’ and ‘Backseat Girl’ make those work due to their tunes and Jane Remover’s remarkable vocals despite getting thinned out due to how the vocals are mixed, letting the noise fervor of the former through those guitars and the latter through the rapid drum flicks land its impact. When those melodic phrases have lasting power on them, it makes those build-ups work, just like on cuts such as ‘Holding a Leech’ due to its smoldering melodic phrases and especially ‘Video’ with its trancing acoustics build-up to the distorted noise and shambling glitch effectively. On the flip side, you get cuts like ‘Lips’ and ‘Idling Somewhere’ where the lack of potent melodic foundations just gets lost within that bruising feedback, leaving the atmosphere to become static noise that ends up fumbling away to no end.
Those frustrations are legitimately disappointing because the songwriting aspect is where Jane Remover incredibly shines through. There is a sense of immense turmoil within the fragile, incredibly brutish details amidst this relationship that Jane Remover describes. Encompassing angst and crushing wallowing amidst details of transness, alcoholism, the predatory music industry, fragmented power dynamics, loneliness, and depression. It leads to the writing ending up succumbing throughout, especially when it leans toward a submissive viewpoint that lacks any kind of romanticization within the tangled thorniness of this relationship and the overall narrative does not show any light at the end of the tunnel. It’s legitimately crushing in a way that allows Jane Remover’s songwriting palette to become sharper and more complex, expressing this brutality with punches that she does not pull back at all.
Going towards the other side of this project, there is acknowledgment towards Jane Remover’s genre swerve that goes all out in both sound and writing flair that has a lot more presence than ever before. The noise rock and shoegaze curvatures amidst choppy glitches and processed production do not exactly come off as strong as the modest tunes just do not support these rapturous backdrops, yet the writing just has so genuinely emotional bite throughout the relationship’s overall fraught state that the emotional downpour picks up so much ache at the end of the record. The record might not overall stick on the musical side of things, but the magnetism that the songwriting pulls through is immense and effective, showcasing Jane Remover’s intriguing impact colliding through once again. The project may perhaps be the experience of one exploring outside their social boundaries where the emotions will get raw and fractured the more they walk farther and farther, an experience that might lead them to a place where they’ll finally settle down after that painstaking journey, away from their own designated pain.
Favorite Tracks: ‘Video’, ‘Cage Girl / Camgirl’, ‘Holding a Leech’, ‘Backseat Girl’, ‘Census Designated’
Least Favorite Track: ‘Idling Somewhere’