Jane Remover
Census Designated
DEADAIR
When artists are given a broad palette from which they can pull sounds, they often end up drowning their own voices in the plethora of choices. On Jane Remover’s sophomore album Census Designated, the hyperpop veteran walks this fine line with impressive agility, populating her songs with a wide array of pyrotechnics, techniques, and styles, while still making sure her vision is honored throughout the sprawling project.
To be census-designated is to live in an unincorporated community that’s nevertheless statistically recorded for government purposes. According to the Census Program’s official website, unincorporated communities are areas “that do not have a legally defined boundary or an active, functioning governmental structure,” with military installments and university and resort towns listed as examples. Within the structure of Jane’s album, the concept of being both acknowledged and an outlier looms large, as do themes of watching and being watched. As a dariacore pioneer, Jane came up as an integral part of an online community, which is to say an unincorporated collection of sorts that still held the same value and significance for its members as any IRL group.
Census Designated sounds like Tool covering Lana Del Rey, or Ethel Cain raised on Primus instead of Bruce Springsteen—it merges worlds in fascinating, surprising ways. “Backseat Girl” is built around a fluid, odd-meter drum groove, layers of harmony, and an explosive chorus highlighted by digital distortion and pummeling cymbal crashes. Above this cacophony, Jane’s voice almost floats, creating an intoxicating dichotomy between textures. “All the time I got off, he’s on my mind again,” she sings, “But I let him drive, and I don’t know why.” Jane is along for the ride, and the willingness to relinquish is thrilling. The line may also be related to a specific experience Jane had while driving in a blizzard on her first tour. “I guess going through a near death experience made me want to stop ruining things for myself,” she explained in a press statement. The danger is dazzling, but at a certain point it can be pretty dumb, too.
Jane combines all of these weighty philosophical themes into an album that’s also intensely focused on sonic arrangements and the minute details that supplement the melodic thrust of this album. On the epic, nearly nine-minute “Video,” Jane builds a track around metal screams and glitchy noise sketches before the chaos subsides into a guitar part that could have been featured on MTV2’s Subterranean in the early 2000s. She sings of desperation and of being seen—being felt. “Boy, I’m so tired of trying to make you change your mind / All I want you to do is chase me.” There’s a desperation in her delivery, but also a sadness. After all, when the game ends, someone still has to clean up the mess.
