Ennui is ravishing. The doleful sigh of resignation is irresistible. ‘Body Language’, despite the vivacity of their seduction, is resistible; and much like the real thing ‘Social Studies’ is boring.

The nine modules of this curriculum provide a perfect refutation of the need for knowledge acquisition. A retrograde step in one’s education, graduation is not prospective.

Bliss tantalises electronic in the ‘wah’ of the opening strains of the first track ‘You Can’, a synthesiser keyboard introducing the sounds of summer for an electro-synthetic generation. Sunrays appear ultraviolet. This though is a moment of effusion, effacement follows as all that might be bright dons shades in trying to rebirth the cool. The ensuing tracks continue in this ever-decreasing return.

If there is to be so little light in life then what is the point. ‘Social Studies’ is pointless. What are these people trying to say? A compendium of discrete lessons bound only by languorous hedonism that demands style rather than perspiration. And so the sigh of the doldrums escapes making an unwelcome companion, but still one that is better company than this album.

Characters in Arundhati Roy’s novel ‘The God of Small Things’ (1996) stand inured in their adulthood after a succession of disasters in their formative years. ‘Social Studies’ is not a tragedy and ennui is the province of the privileged. Yet despite Roy’s resipiscence, it feels right to despair. Body Language say ‘We Got Enough’, but I am left wondering “is this all there is?”