Jagged Baptist Club — Physical Surveillance

Rock

Nice Swan Records

2024

Physical Surveillance is the third album from L.A.’s Jagged Baptist Club. It’s high-energy, hooky rock and roll built for the live show.

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I first heard Jagged Baptist Club because they were opening a few West Coast shows for Sprints on their early 2024 US tour. Seems fitting that the band that put out my favourite record of Year Zero would lead me to the early contender for best record of Year One. Physical Surveillance was released November 15, after a long, long leadup.

Worth the wait? You bet. Here’s the first song on the record, “Hot Brains”:

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This band has a very distinct, in-your-face style of danceable, punk-infused rock and roll. They reference Blur, Public Image Limited, The Rapture and Division of Laura Lee as influences, but I hear Girls Against Boys, LCD Soundsystem, The Stooges and The Fall in there as well. Singer Blake Stokes has a unique, Iggy Pop-ish delivery, with lyrics that are somewhere between ambiguous, abstract and absurd.

But what matters is the energy. Relentless keyboard- and bass-driven hooks keep coming, like a band trying to make the most out of every ounce of the listener’s attention. Even the music videos have a sense of reckless fun to them:

Physical Surveillance is JBC’s third record, and the band’s first on Nice Swan Records. This recording from August 2023(!) of a show at a record store has several of the songs from Physical Surveillance on it. They’re already quite polished, more than a year before the record came out. It’s an unbelievably good live set, and it turned me into a fan:

Between the energy in the live performance and the hookiness of the singles from the record, it’s hard to imagine this band not getting traction on the festival circuit next summer. Here’s “Slid Out in the Sunroom”, which, by JBC standards, is low-key, but it’s still a windows-down, pedal-to-the-floor jam:

I found a couple of great interviews with Stokes, one for a podcast called 22 Grand from about two years ago, and one from even earlier with a podcast called I Love Music. Stokes is a thoughtful (and verbose) interviewee, and either of those interviews have enough material to be a whole thinkpiece. He talks about how and why the rock music scene in Europe is so much stronger than in America right now (including how football fandom and music fandom intersect), about the realities of the music business in 2024 (ie. day jobs and selling out), and living in a rehearsal space for 3 years while showering in a truckstop.

He’s also open about his sobriety, and in the I Love Music interview he talks about how getting sober brough back his fierce love of music, which is exactly what led to me starting this website (in my case, books too).

The band has been playing pretty relentlessly in the LA area in the lead up to the record’s release, and they’ve started announcing some dates for the new year. Here’s hoping that they make it somewhere near me next year.