Widely hailed as an “album for our time”, Jockstrap’s Mercury-shortlisted 2022 debut, I Love You Jennifer B, was a glorious electro-mutant mix of folk, dubstep, jazz, and dance. Guildhall graduates Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye have a tried-and-true process: Ellery (classical violin, open-tuned folk strumming, bittersweet vocals) composes elegant, thoughtful songs; Skye (anarchic at the mixing desk) chops them up into weird virtual reality sonic adventures that feel like the musical equivalent of walking through a fairground funhouse, never knowing what to expect next: squish, roll, slide, shake – or sudden drop.
Although I<3UQTINVU (I Love You Cutie, I Envy You) is loosely billed as an I Love You Jennifer B “remix album”, it is not a straight sequence of the same tracks reworked. The songs don’t even have the same names, with new titles lifted from the fragmentary samples around which they’re built. “Jennifer B”, a glitchy, off-kilter electro-ode to the dancefloor in its first incarnation, becomes the pounding “Good Girl” here – emanating from the line “Everything is good girl”. With its steady pulse, this new version loses some of the deliciously weird unpredictability of the old. Admittedly, though, it’s easier to dance to.
