Jarvis Cocker
Jarvis

THE REVIEW

Jarvis Cocker, solo artist after the Pulp, appears alone. Despite the instrumental contribution of Steve Mackey, the historic bassist of the Sheffield band, and Richard Hawley, who had already collaborated fruitfully with Pulp. In the cover photo, he stands with a furtive expression against a half-gray and half-gray-green background (forget red and black...), and he even needs an arrow to distinguish him from the non-crowd. In the internal photos of the beautiful booklet, he is alone and bewildered: against an immense wall, indoors, on the street, on the stairs, in a corridor. All gone. Pulp no longer exists: no more provincial stories, tales of adolescent loves, pubs, and acrylic afternoons, Saturday nights of drawn-out fun and cigarettes until dawn, mortified sex, and Sunday dreams.

In this album, Cocker, bitter and disillusioned, sings the story of a chilling disillusionment, with very few or almost no hopes or ways out. And to communicate all this, the composed British dandy chooses nothing less than antithesis: so the album concludes with a chorus "Everything's going to be alright" to which it's evident that Cocker himself doesn't believe at all; then in the very sweet, xylophone-laden "Baby's coming back to me", which could sound like the perfect love song, it becomes clear, as the piece progresses, that she will never come back home; then the peaceful middle-class individual, who gives himself airs listening to classical music and occasionally enjoys looking at naked women on the internet, reveals himself as a potential murderer ("I Will Kill Again", minimal, apparently light but very disturbing, like the album as a whole); then "Disney Time", which one would expect to be a jaunty and colorful Pulp-style piece, turns out to be a suffocatingly gloomy track, rather akin to certain Nick Cave, with muffled drumming, dark arrangements, and a very low-toned Cocker (the best thing). Then the first single, "Running the world", is placed as a ghost track after 25 minutes of silence. And it says that the assholes run things. And therefore on the cover, next to that new disoriented Cocker, is a nice parental advisory sticker.

That said, there remains some Pulp residue at the musical level, but not too much. The atmosphere can, in some passages, resemble the darker and more introverted climate of "This is Hardcore" (as in "Heavy weather" or "Big Julie"), but many Pulp typicalities are missing here, from the arrangements of Candida Doyle to Cocker's typical talk-singing, which disappears completely. No track harks back to the glories of "His'n'hers" or "Different Class": other times. The contribution of Hawley can be felt here and there, especially in the pleasant opening ("Don't Let Him Waste Your Time") or in some tracks that have an almost dusty and dated aspect ("Tonite", "Quantum Theory"). For the rest, it's the new Jarvis, alone and solo. The result is a very compact work, spread over slow rhythms (only one true rock song: "Fat Children"), which gives up any excess noise to choose rather constant modulations and attenuations, mutes, and polishes.  Smooth, on the verge of indifference, then pricking in the lyrics.  

The British press has awarded much praise to this new Cocker, a disillusioned and ruthless analyst, focusing especially on the textual aspect of the album, perceived as a harsh critique of today's society at large, and the English one in particular. And musically, they praised its maturity, which led Cocker to slow down, to observe more things, with more awareness, with more concealed fragilities.

No fear, anyway: Cocker has not "grown old," as he warned listeners of "This Is Hardcore" not to do: the spirit has not been lost. He warns on the surface of the CD that the album "should not be used as a sedative," writes verses of extraordinary finesse and wit ("How come they're called 'Adult movies' when the only thing they show is people making babies filmed up close?") and, most importantly, still writes great songs. Succeeding perfectly in making it understood, albeit through an album with a quiet and seemingly serene sonic rendering, how bad it feels underneath. Perfect mimicry of reality.