Throughout these songs, Remover fires their voice out to people, places, and states of mind that perpetually threaten to slip away. If American Football used those endless Illinois plains to ruminate on regret, misunderstanding, and the general overwhelm of having to share your life with others, venturing probes American space as a site of both decrepitude and charged possibility, a place where things might actually start to happen if only they could get a grip on them. Their ties to other people are frozen oceans: so big they slope past the horizon, so fragile they might shatter under the next step.
Maybe they’ll fall in love out there, or maybe they’ll kill everyone they hate, or maybe they’ll kill everyone they love, or maybe they’ll die behind the wheel in a blaze in the early hours of the morning. “Feel like a runaway dreamer runaway dreaming,” Remover muses on “Famous girl” over giddy, skipping guitar chords, their voice practically spinning out across the asphalt. “Kill ’em all for me, baby/Kill ‘em all in my name,” they tease on “Recoil.” Occasionally, they cast their pleas straight up instead of far out: “Please, God, save me,” they implore on “Something has to change” before they scorch their voice into a roar. Each song unfolds as a devotional to intensity for intensity’s sake: It doesn’t matter what it is as long as something, anything, cuts through the fog.
By largely restricting their palette to concrete instrumentation (save for a few scratchy samples and a couple bleeps and bloops), venturing tightens the conceptual distance between “electronic” music and rock, emo, or anything else you make with a voice and guitars and a drum kit. Tons of artists have synthesized rap and emo over the past decade, but the connection is older than that. Listen back to “Never Meant” and you’ll find that a good part of its punch comes not from the melancholy guitar chords or pained vocals themselves, but the way they’re stitched together: the strange, dislocated production on the “there were some things that were said that weren’t meant” refrain, the way it creeps through the air on tenterhooks like an all-natural voice never could. Ghostholding trains Remover’s sharp producer’s ear on the scrape of guitar against guitar, pedal on pedal, snare against snare, vocal on vocal. You don’t need much to start throwing sparks; you just need to smash it together with enough violence.
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