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.
For crazed, lightning-speed energy, whizz forward to the brilliant “Red Eye” (feat Ian Starr) (a reworked “Neon”), which channels some of the rage rave spirit of Prodigy at their firestarting best into a feral blur of growling, skipping, slipping-over beats and backward-skidding string samples. It sounds as though Skye has dropped the original into a wood chipper plugged into a hall of mirrors right next to a wind machine. Warped fragments of the original songs spin, twist and ricochet – often at high speed – all over the show. Skye said he made the remixes quickly; that reckless, impulsive energy is audible from the opener “Sexy” (feat babymorocco) (with its arcade game-winning beat, swaggering-stuttering vocal samples and sweary, witty brags: “You gotta listen to my new EP…”) to the penultimate track, “I Noticed You” (feat Kirin J Callinan) on which Australian singer-songwriter Callinan intones lines about clocking details of a lover in the concrete and the carpet, closing on the amusing payoff: “But most of all I notice you when I’m with you.”
Skye seems more confident letting rip on lesser known songs, meaning he is least inventive when tinkering with the duo’s biggest hit “Glasgow”. The song, which becomes “I Touch” here, is by far the most recognisable track on I<3UQTINVU. Later, Skye adds a cool shaker beat to the harp-backed jazz of original “Angst” in a new version called “I Feel”. The new percussion originally takes the edge off Ellery’s queasy lyrics about feeling her organs “bob about in the dark/ In a mustard mist, in my stomach vase”, but just as you’ve relaxed into this new sway, Ellery’s voice splinters into shards as she bluntly informs us: “You think you float/ But you don’t.”
So many ideas have gone into I<3UQTINVU that it’s almost a new album in its own right. So while it’s not quite as brilliant as I Love You Jennifer B, it does suggest the restless duo are moving into more thrilling terrain. A band for future times, too, I suspect.
‘I<3UQTINVU’ is out 3 November via Rough Trade
