Older, Wiser, Pulpier
Following a quarter-century hiatus, the venerable Britpop band returns, more majestic than ever.
Pulp - More
Appraising the first new Pulp album in 25 years, critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine celebrates the music but puzzles over the slight moniker: “More is a curiously unassuming, almost perfunctory album title for Pulp, a band that specialized in sweeping manifestos during their '90s prime.”
As with all things Pulp, however, there may be more than meets the eye, even to this simplest of album titles. Maybe it’s not just an announcement of additional content— as in, there are now more Pulp songs than there used to be— but the knowing acknowledgment of a band that has, somehow, become even more itself, distilled to its truest essence. Here they are fully comfortable being wordy, nerdy, snarky, and horny, all the more so in middle age— they have embraced everything that makes them Pulp, somehow finding new vibrancy in their primary colors.
Perhaps that’s a matter of time and perspective. After taking a quarter-century to explore other avenues and try on life beyond the band, Jarvis Cocker and Co. sound sanguine about Pulp as their life’s work: "We thought we were just joking, trying dreams on for size/We never realized we'd be stuck with them for the rest of our natural lives.” For better or for worse— and here, it’s all for better— this is the only way Pulp knows how to be, the only thing they know to do. Cocker admits on the very first song: “I exist to do this.”
That’s not to say that More feels indistinct from the fine albums that came before it. Pulp has always focused on two primary texts— their songs are usually about either class or sex; “Common People,” their all-timer of a breakout single, is about both— and each topic comes up again here (sex more than class). Yet on More, the primary subject matter is the band itself— what it means for pop music to be your vocation, to be a cult act on the other side of stardom, to still harbor rock and roll fantasies well into your fifties and sixties.
Helming this majestic record is the producer James Ford, whose own body of work includes notable albums by Arctic Monkeys, Jessie Ware, and Black Country, New Road. The more relevant antecedent is his role producing The Ballad of Darren, the 2023 comeback album from Blur— at one time, Pulp’s Britpop peers and rivals. As with that album, More is the sound of an artist honing its sound while slowing its tempos, moving into a more elegiac, age-appropriate aesthetic.
In the case of Pulp, that means leaning into the band’s loungier side— complete with glitzy strings and harmony vocals stacked throughout the album. That’s not to say the album wants for energy, but even its more assertive moments it sounds disinterested in current pop trends. Opener “Spike Island” has a throbbing new wave pulse, “Grown Ups” is a stomping showtune, and “Got to Have Love” builds into a furious disco rave.
And then there’s Cocker, whose idiosyncrasies could almost be called schtick if they didn’t sound so unforced, so self-possessed. He still does a lot of “pointing and shouting,” as one song puts it, often sounding like he’s rushing to get all his words out as quickly as possible— but he also relies more than ever on the low embers of his voice, breaking again and again into spoken-word interludes pitched somewhere between poetry recitation and stand-up comedy. His encyclopedia of grunts and moans has never been deployed more effectively— nor, on “Grown Ups,” more humorously, as he simulates the indignities of aging with a few bars of sad splutters. (Cocker also uses a dramatic stage whisper more frequently than anyone this side of Joe Biden— and mercifully, more appealingly.)
Cocker sounds more comfortable than he’s ever been in his own skin, even as he grapples with no longer being young and hip. At six minutes, “Grown Ups” is an instant-classic Cocker diatribe, constantly ramping up its fevered jokes and stark reckonings with age and maturity. It’s a song that will resonate with anyone who longs to be “part of the pop conversation,” but is increasingly stuck in the mundanity of computers and the quest for “more food.” It’s too hard to single out the best laugh line, though who else but the terminally British Cocker would find a way to rhyme “vicars” with “knickers”?
Speaking of knickers, age as done nothing to dim Cocker’s libido, and More includes some of his most uninhibited sex songs. “Tina,” a dusky tarantella, introduces a woman Cocker’s never met, but holds close in his romantic fantasies— in a deft bit of world-building, she pops up in multiple songs here, a stand-in for the adolescent fantasies that are hard to let go of yet increasingly difficult to treat with seriousness. Elsewhere, “My Sex” confronts Cocker’s neuroses head-on, in a hilariously breathy R&B slow jam.
“Slow Jam” is the name of another song here, and another Cocker masterclass— a simmering groove that finds room for lurid come-ons, Christ-haunted meditations, and a grim reckoning with death. The way Cocker shifts from considering “the resurrection man” to soliciting a threesome is shocking, but also strangely life-affirming— it’s a song about desire in the face of certain mortality, after all: “Instead of having us this slow death/ we should be having us a slow jam.”
Cocker’s pivot from sacred to profane represents one of several astonishing songwriting feats that make More constantly surprising. Most surprising of all are the songs where the oft-sardonic, frequently-acerbic songwriter displays disarming earnestness and sincerity, heartfelt moments that give More emotional depth and balance. “The Hymn of the North” is an achingly tender blessing from a parent to a child— building to the climactic rumble of a brass band.
And then there’s “Farmer’s Market,” the most straightforwardly romantic song ever committed to a Pulp record. Here, Cocker recounts the “most extraordinary circumstances” that led him to meet his wife, in what might have been a routine grocery run. The album’s most affecting spoken word verse reveals a vein of deep compassion and sly humor: “You smiled and I could see that life had got to you too/ But it was nothing serious— just a flesh wound.”
The album’s centerpiece is “Got to Have Love”— a frenzied rave that effectively mounts a full paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13, the famous “love” passage favored at weddings worldwide. More than any song on the new album, this one presents a new, older and wiser iteration of the Pulp ethos— for as mordant as Cocker and his mates have always been, this song is presented as fully-earnest spiritual manifesto. Even when Cocker resorts to spelling out L-O-V-E, there’s no indication of his tongue being anywhere close to his cheek.
Given Pulp’s rich legacy, it’s understandable that they would mine their own history as a source text, creating layers of meaning through self-mythology. In “Grown Ups,” Cocker admits that everyone’s got to mature at some point— then immediately offers a breathy “are you sure?,” directly quoting “Common People.” Opener “Spike Island,” meanwhile, references a legendary concert performed by The Stone Roses— often considered to be ground zero for Britpop, the movement where Pulp found their mojo.
“Spike Island” is presented here as a kind of second birth— “this time I’ll get it right,” Cocker pleas. With this album, Pulp has done more than stick the landing on their comeback— they’ve made a record that stands proudly among their classics. True to its title, More immediately makes their discography seem a little more expansive— deeper, wiser, funnier, more interesting than it was before.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10.
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