Jane: Berserker
Paw Tracks
There must be something in the water at Other Music, NY's premiere Lower East Side record shop: employee listings have included Beans, Daniel Givens, and now Scott Mou, who partners with Noah Lennox (Animal Collective's Panda Bear) in Jane. While accompanying info suggests Jane sees itself as a more soulful dance alternative to the mechanical 'robo' music coming out of Detroit, Chicago, and Germany, Berserker includes very little evidence to support its claim. In fact, only one of its four tracks, the meandering and lightly rocking tech-house outing “AGG Report,” comes close to being a 'dance' track.
The title piece opens the album promisingly with entranced voices emerging from the whorling depths of a seething Basic Channel funnel, while enough interesting things happen in “Slipping Away” (a tactile intro of woozy smears and crackle, a loping march, churning electro-grooves, and an hallucinatory coda of metallic washes and clatter) to justify its 11-minute length. Berserker is marred, however, by the inclusion of the too-long, CD-exclusive “Swan,” a 25-minute organ drone overlaid by disembodied voices and animal growls that casts its shadow too largely over the album as a whole.
May 2005
