It’s a familiar story for working musicians: In March 2020, the world shut down, forcing artists to cancel tours, push back album releases, and wonder how they’d ever make up the losses. For Toronto-based indie rocker Carlyn Bezic, who had played only a few shows as a touring member of U.S. Girls before COVID hit, the shutdown offered an opportunity to shift priorities to a long-gestating solo project. Cobbled together from unreleased demos she’d written as a part of the pop-punk duo Ice Cream and rock quintet Darlene Shrugg, Bezic’s 2021 debut as Jane Inc., Number One, was an eclectic whirlwind of funky rock and electro-disco that critiqued capitalist structures and tried to reckon with living through digital personas.
Her second album, Faster Than I Can Take, comes a little over a year after the first and has a clearer thematic throughline. Over nine tracks, she crafts disco meditations and euphoric dreamscapes that blur together past, present, and future. “The laws of time have changed,” Bezic sings on glossy opener “Contortionists,” and each song shudders with a cosmic realization. From Bezic’s vantage point, time is porous and shimmering, a fluid entity that’s hard to parse yet easy to embrace. “Oh, I can feel it changing/Oh, the sky is rearranging/Faster than I can take,” she sings on the breezy title track. “Human Being” is a pointed exploration of how others’ perceptions affect our own self-image. “Building a face/Pretend I’m in a public place/Surrounded by strangers/And no one knows my name,” she muses over bouncing synths and a tugging bassline; a vocoder effect makes her voice sound like an actual group of strangers.
Bezic has described her musical persona as “a machine or an entity,” a distinct headspace punctuated by the “Inc.” in her stage name. Likewise, Faster Than I Can Take occasionally conjures the sound of factory automation: Each drumbeat falls into place with precision, and Bezic’s dry vocals sometimes evoke an industrial robot seeking human consciousness. On the abrasive, clattering “2120,” she imagines an invisible force shoving her through time itself: “The days rush past like a dollar bill/That you try to grab but it flies right past you.” Over a resonant cowbell rhythm that rings like an alarm, she chants about a reckoning, desiring to “forge a new infinite fuel/made of anger, and hope, and refusal.”
At other moments, the regimen of the factory fades away. In the sweet bossa nova groove of “Picture of the Future,” a simple acoustic arrangement slowly builds into a heavenly synthscape. Bezic is joined by backing vocalist and arranger Dorothea Paas (also a U.S. Girls touring member), who lifts the track to an ethereal plane. Paas’ vocals appear all over the album with a bright, almost metallic sheen, and her arrangements provide a pillow of moral support for Bezic to rest her frenetic anxieties.
The highlight of Faster Than I Can Take is also seemingly the most stuck in linear time: “Dancing With You” is a seven-minute ’80s-pop opus about Zoom dance parties, a reference that might be annoying if it wasn’t such a bizarrely fun listen—around minute four, a distorted, robotic voice briefly visits the club to deliver a guided meditation. Leaning into the absurdity of those early pandemic moments, Bezic plays the part of a glamorous, Madonna-esque guide. “Use the power of your mind/To bring you to the time of your life,” she sings as synths whizz off to alternate dimensions. It’s the album’s silliest lyric, but it’s strangely compelling in its sincerity. In Bezic’s view, we’re already dancing on a suspended temporal fracture—might as well confront the chaos head on.
