Former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is the most accomplished dramatic actor in rock’n’roll. He has an unforgettable voice for starters, and possesses an uncanny knack for inhabiting the bodies of the various louts, philanderers, and other shallow and morally repulsive men he likes to write about. Cocker is a moralist at heart. Sometimes he’s funny about it; at other times the tone is much, much darker. But jesting or not, he’s always serious.
In his time he’s painted dark portraits of rave culture (“Sorted for E’s and Whizz”), of a man of small soul warning his son not to follow his shallow and destructive path through life (“A Little Soul”), of a rich girl gone slumming (“Common People”), and “the sound of loneliness turned up to ten” (“The Fear”). But the acme of his horrifying peek into male sexuality remains “This Is Hardcore,” in which the song’s speaker spells out his vision of lovemaking in clinical detail: “I’ve seen the storyline played out so many times before/Oh, that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/And then it’s over/Oh, what a hell of a show/But what I want to know/What exactly do you do for an encore?”
Cocker’s plummy actor’s voice and darkly satiric vision made Pulp the most intellectually and spiritually probing band to emerge from Britpop, and Pulp’s dissolution left me inconsolable. Fortunately Cocker continues to record, and 2009’s Further Complications measures up to the best of his former band. The sound is much harder, thanks largely to an unlikely alliance between Cocker and Steve Albini as producer, and has a wonderful glam rock feel to it.
Never before has Cocker committed to recording a song as hard-hitting as “Pilchard.” The punchy and fast-paced “Homewrecker!” boasts a great Roxy Music-school saxophone and could pass for an Aladdin Sane-era Bowie tune, while the title track (and album topper) boasts a big beat, some Eno-school backing vocals, and opens with the wonderful lines, “In the beginning there was nothing/To be honest that just suited me fine/I was three weeks late coming out of the womb/In no great rush to join the rest of mankind.”
The second thing to be said about Further Complications is that on it Cocker handles his usual assortment of morally shallow characters in a more humorous than terrifying manner. There is no “This Is Hardcore” on Further Complications. Instead we have the hilarious anthem “I Never Said I Was Deep,” in which Cocker sings, “I never said I was deep/But I am profoundly shallow/My lack of knowledge is vast/And my horizons are narrow.” But even it strikes the bedrock of human shallowness with the line, “My morality is shabby/My behavior unacceptable/I’m not looking for a relationship/Just a living receptacle.”
Why, the guy can’t even write what appears to be a straightforward love song without adding a touch of ambiguity, as he proves on the lovely “Slush,” in which he sings, “My heart melted at your touch/Turned into slush.” And he’s all bad puns in “Leftovers,” a great ballad in which a self-loathing Cocker sings, “I met her in the museum of paleontology/And I make no bones about it/Said, If you wish to study dinosaurs/I know a specimen whose interest is undoubted.” And the song’s end is delightful, what with Cocker repeating to the accompaniment of some Vegas horn blare, “I told you once/And then I told you twice/And now I told you three times/And at the risk of repeating myself I’m going to say it again/Waaaaah/I wanna be your lover.” Worth the price of the album all by itself, this one.
“Fuckingsong” is loud and dissonant and opens with the lines, “I will never get to touch you/So I wrote this song instead.” The chorus is pure Bowie, the guitars snarl, and the sexual frustration is palpable. “Angela” is the greatest Kinks song not written by Ray Davies and includes some wonderful handclaps. “Hold Still” is a cryptic little ballad that may or may not be about S&M, and includes the great line, “I’m alive but I plan to die in the future.” As for clamorous “Caucasian Blues” it rocks balls, and features the great lines, “All gather round now:/I’ll tell you what it’s all about/You find a good woman/And then you fuck her til your hair falls out/A round of applause, please/For the totally clapped-out/You got them Caucasian Blues again.”
I could go on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that Cocker is the Jonathan Swift of rock. He turns his bleak view of humankind into song, and spares no one. On Further Complications his satire isn’t as savage as it is on 1998’s This Is Hardcore, and that may be a good thing. This Is Hardcore is as harrowing as they come, and he seems to have pulled back some. No one could keep one’s sanity going on like that. Once your estimation of humankind reaches zero, you have two choices—to sink into rancorous cynicism or laugh. Cocker’s a funny guy, and good for him, he seems to have chosen the latter option.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
