Pulp: More review – Jarvis Cocker and co's great bait and switch

Irish Times

a day ago

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Artist
:
Pulp
Label
:
Rough Trade
Britpop reunions have tended towards two extremes. There's the grubby cash grab, where a group who weren't all that great in the first place try to squeeze as much cold, hard currency as possible from their audience, regardless of the impact on their reputation. We leave it to the reader to conclude which artists fall into this category, though you can take it that we do not refer to The Boo Radleys or Echobelly.
Then there's a comeback that casts an old band in a new light. Consider Suede, who have done their best work since re-forming. Or Blur, whose album
The Ballad of Darren
, from 2023, was a beautiful portrait of fiftysomething melancholy.
Pulp
's first album for 24 years falls into neither category – because, though its intentions are noble, its execution is spotty. What's more, it makes the mistake of flooring the listener with a fantastic opening track, then peters out in a grim drizzle of indie plodders that showcase
Jarvis Cocker
's way with a despondent couplet but don't achieve an awful lot else.
More isn't entirely a disaster: it won't ruin your memories of Pulp's glory days, which is surely the risk with the
Gallaghers
' imminent pension-top-up tour. But it achieves a feat beyond even Cocker's most despondent lyric in reminding the listener that some things are perhaps best left in the past, Pulp albums among them.
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To their credit, there is never any sense of phoning it on the part of the musicians. (Cocker is joined by the drummer Nick Banks, the keyboardist Candida Doyle and the guitarist Mark Webber, but the record has been made without Russell Senior, Pulp's original guitarist, and, of course, Steve Mackey, its late bassist, who died in 2023.)
The catalyst for the project was a run of gigs that year that included a
stop at St Anne's Park
in Dublin, the sort of unremarkable suburban backdrop that has been the fuel for Cocker's songwriting since his formative years as a skinny punk in Sheffield.
[
Pulp at St Anne's Park review: Suddenly, a rather ordinary gig jumps to an extraordinary place
Opens in new window
]
It was while on tour that they trialled one of More's better tunes, the lush, string-drenched Hymn of the North. It's a beautiful moment, borne aloft by Cocker's ruminative, rumbling voice – if chocolate were a sound, and were also very sad, this is what it would sound like.
But it is a rare pick-me-up across an LP that fails to reach either the bittersweet highs of His 'N' Hers and Different Class or plumb the melodramatic depths of This Is Hardcore, Cocker's 'Actually, I hate being famous' lament.
More starts, however, with that bait and switch, in the form of the glorious Spike Island (written with Jason Buckle, Cocker's collaborator in Relaxed Muscle, his synth-pop duo). Tragically, this is not about the former prison camp in Cork Harbour – how great would it be if it were – but refers to The Stone Roses' disastrous gig in northwest England in the early 1990s, which has grown in the retelling to become a landmark in youth culture.
The track is wonderful. Cocker's voice achieves a yelping majesty, and there's lots of dizzy, fizzy guitar going off in the background. Here the album dangles before us the illusion that you can go back and that everything will be the same. But it isn't 1995, and Pulp can no longer crank out bangers such as Do You Remember the First Time?, a point painfully illustrated as the LP unspools into a lustreless exploration of midlife ennui (not helped by James Ford's flat production).
Cocker has a reputation as a scintillating observer of everyday life. But throughout More he risks stating the thumpingly obvious. Grown Ups, which plods along like a baroque Chas & Dave, finds him reflecting on how his peers have deserted their trendy neighbours of old and are more stressed about wrinkles than acne. Neither is an insight that will have you sitting bolt upright.
A sort of blend of Serge Gainsbourg and Benny Hill, Cocker in his songwriting prime captured wonderfully the curtain-twitching prurience of the British middle classes. He comes back around to the theme of buttoned-down sexuality on Slow Jam, where he natters to Jesus about his sex exploits (Cocker's, that is), then proposes spicing up his love life with a threesome between 'you, me and my imagination'.
More flickers to life now and then. An exhilarating disco groove propels Got to Have Love, which suggests Giorgio Moroder collaborating with Philip Larkin (an inspiration for all morose Yorkshire wordsmiths). And the project ends on a satisfying note with the comforting hush of A Sunset, written with Cocker's fellow Sheffield musician Richard Hawley. It's quite lovely. But, arriving at the end of an often listless, seemingly pointless record, lovely isn't enough.