The Singles Jukebox

Jacob hands us a love letter to thinkpieces…

[Video]
[8.00]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perhaps the most romantic song ever written — Jane Remover captures the feeling of having a crush so vast in its magnitude that you can’t help but say something bizarre, overwhelmed by the sheer depth of feeling. She calls herself a thinkpiece and it’s not the most outlandish line here. She quotes an Usher deep cut and it makes perfect sense. All the while, the track sounds like a disorderly succession of radio bumpers intruding upon each other, a jumble of jock jam guitars and schmaltzy R&B synths falling onto the track in a logic all their own. Can you feel that? is the incessant question of the track, displaced from her voice into the booming tones of a mixtape hype man, and the answer is obvious: of course I can. The design of “Magic I Want U” means that you must feel it, enveloping every inch of your experience.
[10]

Aaron Bergstrom: I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase “it sounds like you just mixed all the different energy drinks together” as a compliment before.
[9]

Will Adams: Jane Remover first piqued my interest with her fantastic remix of Tinashe’s “Nasty.” “Magic I Want U” delivers the same exhilarating turn-of-the-millennium glitchy goodness, like if you passed BT’s “Somnambulist” through a spiralizer, but the turn of phrase “gold in your mouth” that forms its hook reveals a songwriting sensibility worthy of the designation of “magic.”
[8]

Julian Axelrod: I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about VH1’s I Love the ’90s series, a slapdash assemblage of soundbites and nostalgia shards that boiled an entire decade down to a digestible slush. While it hasn’t aged well, it was formative for me, beaming a litany of cultural touchstones into my teen brain via a game of cultural telephone. Jane Remover, who was born less than a year before I Love the ’90s premiered, presents a similar cracked rear view recollection of the sounds of yesteryear; listening to “Magic I Want U,” you’d think Sneaker Pimps and Deee-Lite were the dominant acts of their decade. But where most pop archivists are content to present the reference and call it a day, Jane’s approach has a sonic and emotional restlessness that feels true to the TikTok age. The song hops between hooks and perspectives in a way that’s as much like a YouTube video essay as a friend recapping an argument with their ex. Even before her latest side project was confused for a fictional ’90s band, the vessel seemed to be as crucial to the mission as its message; it’s about who she’s singing as and who she’s singing to, and either one could be you. She could be your new favorite thinkpiece or favorite girl, but Jane Remover’s genius lies in how she collapses the space between the two.
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Katherine St. Asaph: This is a song that is textually about wanting to fuck a music blogger and I don’t know how I feel about that.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Jane Remover sings “Magic I Want U” like a teen pop icon debuting on TRL: her phrasing is inflected with R&B sass and Cheiron quantization, and you might almost wonder when her band of ebullient backing dancers will appear. “I could be his new favorite thing, his favorite girl,” she daydreams. “Anything to tell me that I’m your number one.” But perhaps she sings it like she’s remembering a long-ago pop song she heard on TRL: murmured and confidential, submerged in digital haze and electronic intrusions. Silly string synth lines and sample pack breakbeats despoil a track that drifts like dust specks in sunlight; this is a homemade blockbuster that stands in a spotlight built from an LCD screen display.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I don’t know what’s going on here: guitar noise, K-pop squiggles, and a vocal whose confidence reassures. Its length keeps it from total triumph.
[8]

Ian Mathers: In theory and often in practice I love a pop move, but honestly, I miss the noise here; I can’t deny the ruthless efficiency of the chorus, but it kind of feels like the bad kind of earworm. And while in theory I love the idea of the cartoonishly “sexy” radio guy voice thing going on in the back, every time I play this I find myself enjoying that bit less and less. I have to live my truth!
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: This sounds like a lower-level technician who snuck onto the grounds of the proverbial pop music factory late at night and started tinkering with all the expensive equipment. Which is what the digital revolution has allowed us all to do, but Jane Remover approaches the scenario with the bygone sense of open-range possibility that you’d find in a Wired cover story from 1998. “Magic I Want U” is built on familiar reference points, but they’re used as seeds rather than blueprints, an organic kind of genrelessness in a time when “genreless” has lost much of its meaning. The song optimizes for both hookiness and elusiveness, foregrounding a set of rubbery vocal acrobatics that refuse to be pinned down for more than seconds at a time. Its dream-like qualities are a byproduct of this looseness in structure, which has a cost in immediacy even as it more cannily reflects the subject matter. “Liminality” and “limerence” may not be etymologically related (I checked), but here they intersect in a satisfying way.
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Leah Isobel: Census Designated used Ethel Cain cosplay to navigate the complex and often challenging array of feelings attendant to transition: grief, defiance, hopelessness, anger, suspension, impatience. But where Ethel Cain songs are about stillness and entrapment, Jane’s work is more essentially about movement and freedom. In her songs, pain is just the inverse of pleasure; a song like “Video” works because its hurt eventually gives way to ecstatic, roaring bliss. Rather than standing monolithically on its own, pain is minimized, the just price for a passage into a better life. “Magic I Want U,” then, is the flipside. Jane returns to the frenetic energy of Frailty cuts like “movies for guys,” but replaces the restlessness with simmering swagger, corroding immediate ear-candy pleasures with spiky and incongruous textures at every edge. It’s cage-captured joy, a dizzying upward spiral into hell. 
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Nortey Dowuona: goshdarnit call her back.
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