Adam Wood

Just as I did for January ↩︎
‘Emerald’ has proven to be an earworm nonpareil ↩︎

You can browse the archive, and consider signing up right here ↩︎

Jockstrap @ The Bullingdon

Last night I caught a performance by London-based genre-dismantlers Jockstrap at The Bullingdon, on Oxford’s Cowley Rd. It’s a 400-capacity venue that I’ve been to for a few shows, but this was the first time I’ve seen it packed. The band’s current (sold out) tour, in support of debut album I Love You Jennifer B (2022), is also taking them as far afield as Australia & Japan — a further sign that their frenetic, adventurous sound has struck a nerve.

The set list was probably about as balanced as Jockstrap can get, pulling from both the softer side of their oeuvre — songs like the pretty & sad ‘Glasgow’, which Georgia Ellery sings and strums largely solo¹ — to the down-right unstable (see eg. ‘Robert’). Most tracks, however, are some mix of styles: the band shifting restlessly between vibes and valences (ie. the danceable middle third of single ‘Concrete Over Water’, a song that is otherwise something approaching a ballad).

One aspect of the sequencing that I really enjoyed, is the way in which following ‘Concrete Over Water’ (2022) with ‘The City’ (2020) makes the earlier track read as a neat coda to the more recent one.

‘Angst’ is a three-minute song on the album that sounds as though it was recorded as a four-minute song, and then had its last quarter compressed into the track’s final ~25 seconds. The effect is similar to that of scrubbing through those final moments of audio, and I would have guessed that it would be achieved live by employing a sample. It was a delight to see Ellery sing it, whilst Taylor Skye pitch-shifted her vocal.

The whole performance was admirably tight, and you could tell the spell was working: the crowd unfailingly remained silent throughout the quieter moments, and exploded into motion on the high-energy songs. Personal favourite ‘Debra’ felt like it landed particularly well.

Finally, what a joy it must be to know you’ve got a bona fide banger like ‘50/50’ in your back pocket to drop as a closer. Even though the (no budget) official video could have been shot at last night’s show, it only goes some way to depicting how much harder the song hits in person.

• • •

Re-listening to I Love You Jennifer B ahead of the show (and again this morning) I’m experiencing a little regret that I didn’t find a spot for it on my end of year top 20. It was one of a few records that made a shortlist, but not the final cut. It’s testament to Jockstrap that the live show injects even more vitality to these already super-vibrant songs, and has me second guessing myself.

she is also the violinist in the Mercury Prize-nominated band Black Country, New Road, and brought out the violin a couple of times during the set, to add yet another flavour to the mix ↩︎

Heck, it shouldn’t be a surprise; I have a decade-old blogpost about it. ↩︎
I’ve also dug out an older piece: my undergraduate thesis 🫣 ↩︎

Tim Maughan — Infinite Detail (2019)

It’s a curse of our current vantage point, that we feel compelled now to assess works of speculative fiction published immediately before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, against our lived experiences these past three years. Tim Maughan’s 2019 novel, Infinite Detail, is concerned with a very different worldwide disaster: one which is ‘viral’ in a digital sense, rather than in a biological / epidemiological one. Nevertheless, the allegory bears fruit by virtue of the extent to which Maughan is interested in the secondary effects of isolation, scarcity, and precarity. Separated into ‘Before’ and ‘After’ chapters, the novel’s fulcrum is an act of technological terrorism that results in the complete collapse of the internet. Maughan — who has written for outlets including the BBC, New Scientist, and Vice on ‘cities, class, culture, technology’ etc. — uses this pivot as means to explore both our current (over-)dependence on networked systems, and the potential shape of consequences to their collapse. For those of us who, not long ago, queued to get into supermarkets, where a mix of fear, greed, and straining infrastructure had already rendered shelves mostly empty, there are passages here that have grown eerily familiar in the years since the novel’s publication.

Maughan draws characters well enough, incorporating voices recognisable from the south west of Britain, in which large portions of the novel are set. Things are a little less sharply rendered with respect to the through-lines of characters’ motivations, and the architecture of the novel’s overall plot. The alternating ‘Before’ & ‘After’ chapter headings have the unfortunate effect of casting the technological catastrophe as the narrative’s center point. And when it comes (in the form of a pseudo-manifesto more than half way through the text), it is underwhelming, largely comprising such edgelord bons mots as ‘we let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts’ and ‘SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves’.

Perhaps, however, this is Maughan’s point: this is an act of terrorism perpetrated by people who consider it an act of liberation via vandalism, and whom prove shamefully ignorant of the extensive consequences. To his credit — and the novel’s benefit — less focus is spent on the mechanics of the collapse (settling for hand-waving talk of viruses, worms, and floods of junk data) than on how people — and collectives of people — cope. In mining this vein of narrative, Maughan is commendably unromantic, even-handedly exploring the undeniable negatives of commercialised hyper-connectivity, but also the ways in which forced disconnection could be worse. I enjoyed these passages where they occurred, even if I came away wishing that the novel overall had committed to a thesis — something which I found a little lacking.

• • •

As a side note, there is a thread of Infinite Detail that concerns the digital preservation of a particular location in the form of a temporally-manipulable virtual space. Donning AR glasses (‘spex’, in the parlance of the novel), characters are able to virtually explore a recorded time period in the history of the space that they are physically inhabiting. This rekindled my long-held desire for a digital experience akin to attending a piece of Punchdrunk’s elaborate, immersive theatre. I found myself repeatedly ruminating on the possibilities represented by The Croft of Maughan’s novel as setting for a non-combat, exploration / mystery video game, following in the footsteps of titles like Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) and Umurangi Generation (2020).