There's just something about Georgia Ellery's voice, man. I couldn't tell you exactly what it is. She is obviously immaculately trained, but that's not really why it's special. Sometimes I can’t stand vocalists who are note perfect, showy, expansive. I think what I love about her voice is how hyperreal it sounds. It's asymptotically pristine. There's no vibrato and relatively little breathiness. Her entries are sharp, immediate, and distinctively soprano. She commits to the bit – the bit being popstar – and succeeds emphatically. You feel something every time she’s on the mic. If it weren’t for Ellery as a singer (she plays violin and guitar for both Jockstrap and Black Country, New Road), it’s possible that Jockstrap might just be an oddball electronic outfit, maybe signed to XL but consigned to cult hero status. But here they are, more than that. The band won everyone over last year and feel poised for still greater heights.

Which leads to I<3UQTINVU, essentially a full-length remix of Jockstrap’s 2022 debut album, I Love You Jennifer B. Pretty much every song from that original record has been comprehensively reworked by Taylor Skye, the other (equally essential) member of Jockstrap, into a fully formed, fantastically interesting album of its own.

Listening to Jockstrap is exhilarating, the most obvious reason being because of the band’s exceptional craftsmanship. On Jennifer B, their efforts were poured into sumptuous, organic hyperpop – at this point I acknowledge that “organic hyperpop” sounds like an oxymoron but I feel it better describes its sound than “electropop” as I have read elsewhere – that sounded utterly convincing, as if it should have already been obvious that classically trained musicians were best suited for making forward-thinking pop. This time around, they make an effortless pivot towards electronica, infusing strobelit dance music with hyperactive cloud rap. No sound feels out of their reach.

However, there is another reason why the band is so captivating, and it has nothing to do with musicality and everything to do with vocal treatment. Ellery’s voice is so expressive that it can imbue even the fidgetiest Jockstrap instrumental with sincere, acute emotion – the kind of feeling that most electronic acts can only ever approximate. The power of a well-placed vocal can be transformative, and the band really latch on to this idea on I<3UQTINVU, harnessing vocal fragments — from Ellery and beyond — for maximal cathartic effect.

Take ‘Sexy’. The song reworks three separate Jennifer B tracks into full-bore Italo, replete with dramatic disco strings. It is bold, chaotic and lacking subtlety entirely. A minute in, the track is already charged-up and pretty sick. Then, a voice: “I feel real hot right now, real fucking hot”. “Let’s fucking go, let’s fucking go!”. The voice is Babymorocco, an oddball UK vocalist possessing the hilarious cheese of a classic Eurodance rapper. He goes nuts. After the drop, he doesn’t hand over the mic: “Let’s take our clothes off! You’ve got to listen to my new EP! It’s called The Sound. It’s being released on True Panther. I even did a song called ‘Total Bass of Your Heart’, Taylor Skye!”. It’s hard to explain how genuinely funny it is. He does an ad in the middle of the song! And then he does it again! What was already a shameless dancefloor romp becomes a giddy showstopper. By the time Ellery’s vocal arrives, manipulated into melodic gibberish, the track has already built so much goodwill that the rest of it feels like a victory lap. She floats over rolling drums and chords. Babymorocco returns: “Thank you so much for coming! I hope you get home safe. Text me when you get home”. Lol, sure!

Everything that happens in the vocal range seems to elevate these remixes from merely fun and creative to something genuinely sensational. A lot of the time it is Ellery who is doing the transfixing, but other Jockstrap collaborators on I<3UQTINVU make pretty wild contributions. On 'All roads lead to London', ERSATZ brings a camp, theatrical energy that sounds nothing like Coby Sey's introspective rapping nor Ellery's baroque 'Concrete Over Water' chorus. Ian Starr's verse on 'Red Eye' is more unhinged than anything Jockstrap have yet recorded. And on 'I Noticed You', Kirin J Callinan delivers smoky, baritone spoken word that sounds like Ellery’s direct inverse. This is a patchwork approach to album creation. Skye and Ellery step back from their auteurist roles on Jennifer B to bring strange vocal characters, many of which are Ellery’s disfigured forms, into the fold. They lurch out of the fizzy electronic backdrop and distinguish I<3UQTINVU from previous Jockstrap projects. You can imagine each new voice extending a hand to listeners craving something new and weird.

The album’s best moments are dizzying. Sometimes these are just that – moments – where Skye’s glitchy production and Ellery’s mesmerising voice approach perfection. In the final stanza of ‘I Feel’, a digitised take on Jennifer B’s ‘Angst’, a gate filter is applied to Ellery’s delirious verse while sub-bass pulses underneath (à la ‘Love Lockdown’). It is both sublimely melodic and intensely rhythmic, the song taking on an unexpected but welcome urgency. Some of the highlights are entire songs. One of them is ‘Sexy’. Another one is ‘Good Girl’, a dark, sultry disco stomper (à la ‘Black Light’). Nowhere else is the interplay between Skye behind the boards and Ellery in the spotlight more compelling. The track’s hefty, mechanical four-to-the-floor works precisely because of Ellery’s delicate sigh. Her vocal sounds like a closely mic’d bedroom recording, a whispered dream of escape set to pummeling drums. The contrast is brutal and unbelievably emotive, the perfect soundtrack to dancefloor protagonism.

The final highlight is ‘Sexy 2’, the only original composition on I<3UQTINVU. It changes tack completely, with prominent fingerpicked guitar recalling early Elliott Smith. There is nothing shadowy or mangled about it; it is tender and sweet like no other song in Jockstrap’s oeuvre. It also leaves a lot to the imagination. Ellery spends a couple verses falling for a girl on the dancefloor, and then the strings, guitar and shakers take the track out. The feeling lingers, something that doesn’t tend to happen on a Jockstrap song. For the first time, Skye and Ellery are happy to let the song reach its natural conclusion, to sit with a sound that just feels really pretty, even if it isn’t new. I suppose, for this band, that itself is something new.

81

Sam Gollings

8 December 2023