Jane Inc. is more than a sum of its parts

Carlyn Bezic cuts a path through modernist anxiety on ‘Faster Than I Can Take’

Photo by Shelby Fenlon.

“I feel like we’re in a moment of real ‘why not?’” Carlyn Bezic remarks over the phone as she’s mulling over the shapeshifting sounds that populateJane Inc.’s  Faster Than I Can Take, the follow up to last year’s solo debut, Number One. 

A musician known for her versatility towing the line between jagged simplicity and high camp, rocked out indulgence with Amanda Crist in Ice Cream, ripping blazing guitar leads in Darlene Shrugg, and the occasional U.S. Girls appearance, Bezic is a musical polymath, and all of those skills are put to use in Jane Inc.

Conceptualizing the solo project as a company in which “all the employees are me,” Bezic frames the project in terms of fractural magnification and sublimation, simultaneously nodding to the middle name she shares with the placeholder Jane Doe. “I’m like a machine or an entity that’s making things that isn’t necessarily me, Carlyn — it’s kind of an easy way for me to psychologically get into a different headspace.

In previous interviews Bezic has commented on the conflicting responsibilities she feels expressing herself while attempting to commodify her art, and Faster Than I Can Take channels that tension directly in its songwriting and arrangement. Bearing the accelerated pace of modern life, the uncertainty of the future, and their implications for the present, the album inserts itself into a milieu perfectly crafted for the post-genre anti-era of Spotify playlists, tracks incorporating disparate elements spanning from disco, funk, and out electronics to folk, choral music, and Brian Eno’s art rock, full of dynamic left turns. For Bezic that’s been a blessing and a curse.

“I once in a while start to feel a bit nervous about it, because when I first shared the album with people in very early stages, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, well, you know, it’s pretty nuts how it goes all over the place,’ and people would be like, ‘Oh, it didn’t really occur to me that it was like that.’ I felt insecure about it. Like it had to be cohesive in every way.”

The album is also an interrogation of that postmodern landscape, and “Contortionists,” the warped, swelling opening track as well as the first single from the album, smuggles one in from the jump.

“The laws of time have changed / months pass in minutes, hours feel like days,” Bezic sings. Caught up in that time melt, she voices a desire for something stable, while the track finds that in a beat and a guitar riff.

Jane Inc. and the music Bezic makes with Amanda Crist in Ice Cream has routinely been considered through the lens of gender rather than class, but class consciousness has often been a concern, Ice Cream’s 2019 album FED UP self described as an examination of “The pressures of living under late capitalism and the male gaze.”

“Take me away, away from my body / Take me away, take my rent, take my hobby,” the pair once plead on the album’s titular anti-anthem. 

An undercurrent of class consciousness permeates Jane Inc., too, often exploring the ways individuals are atomized by capitalism and the longing for connection they feel as a result.

Bezic says that instinct extends back to her visual art practice.

“In a lot of my visual artwork from earlier in my life I am interested in especially the feminine body as like a constructed thing, but also identity as a constructed thing — the body being affected by space and social constructs, but also physical constructs,” Bezic explains. “For much of my life I had a vision of myself as not so much a full human being, but just a kind of entity that experiences passed through, kind of like a piece of mesh or something. Some things would stick and some things would go through, but as I’ve done a lot of work in therapy to become an older, more mature person, I’m becoming more of my own entity that can comfortably press up against other structures and then in that way be in conflict with them.”

By grounding the struggle in the material terms of destructive physical events (“Pummelled Into Sand,” “Obliterated”) and tangible objects (“Steel,” “Gem,” “Dirt and the Earth”), resistance feels more approachable.

Over a sun-dappled folk pop backdrop caught somewhere between Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” on “Picture of the Future,” Bezic leans into acoustic guitar twang, shakers, and a click track, asking listeners to “Think of what we could grow if we work the soil,” collaborator Dorothea Paas pouring light all over it with her glowing choral arrangements.

“Because we can’t predict the future, in that sense too there’s a lot of possibility,” Bezic comments. “I wrote that song kind of as an ode to my partner’s green thumb and just being in this new space and the possibilities that it opened up to us felt like a small way of talking about hope for the future.”

It makes sense Bezic would counter the album’s modernist anxieties with an appeal to slow culture, and much of Faster Than I Can Take was born from a visit to her partner’s family’s island home in BC, where she borrowed her partner’s brother-in-law’s classical guitar and started writing with it.

“All of those guitar songs came out of that period of time,” Bezic says. “Although instrumentally they felt so different from some other things I had been working on, thematically they felt of the same emotional idea. So I was initially wary of having such intense tonal shifts and dynamic shifts, but I started to feel like that kind of worked in its favour. The emotions the album’s dealing with are not easy or simple and a lot of them are really contradictory, so the idea that the album can keep going like all these kind of sharp turns felt like it worked. I also just personally like albums that do that.”

Faster Than I Can Take is out April 22, 2022 via Telephone Explosion Records. Pre-order via Bandcamp.

Jane Inc. performs new material from Faster Than I Can Take on Long Winter TV tonight (March 17, 2022) at 7PM EST. Tune in here.