What makes it work so well is that this anarchy is not an anything-goes anarchy: These songs are so carefully composed, so intentional, that every cyborgian burp and steel snare fits perfectly. Everything and nothing tramples each other. Jane sculpts the songs like an animator making sure every pixel of a motion graphic is properly textured. There’s the wah-wah guitar on “Fadeoutz,” the heavenly stutter-choir to open up “angels in camo,” the yawning harmonica across “Dreamflasher.” Jane practically hosts an Easter egg hunt for longtime fans, littering songs like “JRJRJR” with samples of their old music. The length of the tracks (a five-minute song could qualify as an EP in the rage rap scene) could be tiresome if not for Jane’s increasingly expressive vocals. They flutter out into sweet pop melodies and contort in new and weird ways, like the maniacal laughter on “Experimental Skin.”
Inside the maelstrom is a mind sprinting just as fast, snapping between highs and lows while struggling to keep up with a lifestyle that’s constantly changing. It’s such a contrast to the Jane of yore, who was too afraid to record vocals at home in case it disturbed their parents. Now they’re performing to thousands of feverish fans but also wracked by anxiety and trying to hold on to the relationships they cherish. There are moments of unhurried beauty, like the gothic comedown of “Dark night castle,” but the most frequent feeling is a kind of ravenous unburdening, a brain at the brink. On “Dreamflasher,” Jane desperately tries to cling on to the feeling of being loved by the one person who matters. Maybe the solution is to give it all up, they wonder: “I’d put down the mic just to feel that way forever.”
Instead of the tender working-through-differences approach favored by other introspective singer-songwriters in Jane’s generation, the Revengeseekerz approach is catharsis via chaos. When you feel like your life’s falling apart, fuck it—let’s dance all night. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and passive aggression, let’s explode some brains and give these “dead bitches a proper sendoff.” Jane’s lyrics could be frustratingly opaque in the past. Here they mostly manage to balance the cryptic and direct, darting from blurry vignettes about relationships gone awry to gems like, “Jesus never had it with a freak bitch.” Jane’s voice pierces the hazardous noise at moments of max impact, like when they shriek, “I can’t let you bitches win!”
Everything begins and ends with “JRJRJR,” the lead single and final song on the album. Jane’s swerving through Silverlake and self-doubt, talking about balling out on a new face, a new name, a new city, while the music convulses like a power plant in the early stages of implosion. Its self-possessed recklessness distills Revengeseekerz into a single concentrated blast. It’s almost like a taunt: Nothing you know or think about Jane Remover will ever stay static. They can’t be bound to a genre, a scene, a geographic location, or even a name.
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