Toronto-based musician Carlyn Bezic (U.S. Girls, Ice Cream, Darlene Shrugg) has announced her second solo album as Jane Inc., Faster Than I Can Take, coming April 22 on Telephone Explosion Records (Mas Aya, Dorothea Paas, Scott Hardware). Our first preview of the record is “Contortionists,” out now along with a music video.
Faster Than I Can Take is entirely written and self-produced by Bezic, and is described in a press release as “a disco-inflected, danceable meditation on the permeable boundaries between our interior and exterior worlds.” The album follows Bezic’s acclaimed solo debut Number One, released in March 2021.
On lead single and album opener “Contortionists,” Bezic measures time in music, singing over a gently burbling synth loop, “The laws of time have changed / Months pass in minutes, hours feel like days / Every moment’s a beat, every beat a breath / In, out, again and again.” Her labelmate Dorothea Paas (U.S. Girls, Badge Epoque Ensemble) adds backing vocals, and halfway through the track, the beat stutters, then reconstitutes in double time, with guitar strums pushing the song into a higher, more buoyant gear. Bezic finds respite in connection (“Baby, it’s me and you / Tell me you feel it, too”), like she’s learning to fully inhabit each moment, rather than simply waiting, frozen, as it ticks by.
“At first I thought I was making a record about time,” Bezic recalls of Faster Than I Can Take in a statement, “but I was actually making a record about how, in moments of intense anxiety, you’re living in the past, present and future at the same time. A million moments existing at once, real and imagined.”
Check out the “Contortionists” video (dir. Shelby Fenlon and Lee Henderson) below and find the details of Faster Than I Can Take further down.
Faster Than I Can Take Art:
Faster Than I Can Take Tracklist:
1. Contortionists
2. Human Being
3. Picture of the Future
4. Every Rip
5. An Ordinary Thing
6. 2120
7. Faster Than I Can Take
8. Dancing With You
9. Pummelled into Sand
