"I was 17 when I heard the countdown start..." sang Jarvis Cocker in 1991, a decade of dogged obscurity into his Pulp adventure, but finally getting his urgent ambition back on track. Which means that this new solo debut makes it over a quarter-century since the clock started ticking on his peculiar pop career. The uncharitable might suggest that countdown ended long ago-- when his band conquered Glastonbury in 95, when he stormed Michael Jackson's stage at the Brits in 96, when Pulp's greatest hits limped onto an ignominious #71 on the UK charts in 2001-- and by now we are deep into injury time. Of course, those same people might have suggested he call it a day in 91.
The comeback begins, inauspiciously, with a sketchy instrumental called "Loss Adjuster"-- the kind of thing that usually suggests a desperate pop musician touting around for a little soundtrack work. But in its title at least, it gives a hint of the record's concerns. Because it's not only his surname he's mislaid somewhere in the past five years: Jarvis is the record of someone losing hope, the sound of dejection turned up to 10. Cocker was always Britpop's poet laureate of anticipation, creaming himself at the thought of the next seedy shag, the glittering prospect of fame, the moonage daydream of buzzing around on jetpacks, or even the thought of a provincial shopping center fountain in the unimaginable year 2000. It was always likely to end in disappointment-- but how else were you to survive the monotonous mundanity without supercharging it with the promise of sex, death, and celebrity? Even the crashing hangover of This Is Hardcore took a sneaky, surreptitious thrill in just how sublimely low it could go.
What awaits the disappointed romantic, when he concludes that life isn't elsewhere, is the evil of banality... and maybe the banality of evil. "From A to I"-- the title can't quite bring itself to spell things out-- is one of a series of gentle little ballads that matter-of-factly suggest "it's the end, why don't you admit it? It's the same from Auschwitz to Ipswich." "I Will Kill Again" is another morsel of comfort-food turned sour, detailing a middle-class evening-- a nice family home, a bottle of wine, some classical music-- and the overwhelming sensation that at the end of the day, you're a murderer at heart. It's an odd effect-- like Radiohead played for queasy laughs, or as though Chris Martin was suddenly possessed by the spirits of Spengler and Adorno-- but you can't say it's entirely successful. Because Cocker's great gift as a writer was his ability to dramatize situations, craft little plays within fizzing three-minute pop songs. "Cunts Are Still Running the World"-- the album trailer, and a secret track 30 minutes after the record's ended-- makes a point with admirable bluntness, and has the thrill of plain speaking in an anodyne pop culture, but it's a placard for the pissed-off rather than a pop song.
"Black Magic" nails the disillusion. Like the self-referential "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time," it's a stodgy enough lump of glumly glam riffola, but it's one of the rare occasions Cocker sounds involved in a song. "You only get to see the light one time in your life," he complains. "Is there anything more wretched than having just one sight?". It's bitter but brave, a kind of negative tribute to the magic of pop from someone who's been cast out of its spell. Elsewhere he sounds most alive singing from beyond the grave: "Fat children took my life," he seethes on the eponymous rant. "The parents are to blame"-- knowing he's sounding like a nannyish MP or Daily Mail reader, but running with it anyway-- "breeding maggots without the sense to turn into flies." At least he can still get intoxicated with disgust.
Cocker is too much of an entertainer not to offer some way out-- even Hardcore tacked on some unconvincing uplift. But the final two tracks here really are the strongest, saving the record and suggesting some way out of the funk. "Quantum Theory" is an eerie prayer to possibility of parallel dimensions where "everyone is happy, fish do not have bones...and you are not alone." There is a better world-- well, because there must be.
And though it doesn't look strong on paper, it's "Big Julie" that makes the record worthwhile. It's essentially a Belle and Sebastian song-- albeit a better one than Stuart Murdoch has mustered for a few of years: the story of lonely teenage girl, perved over by the local boys, their dads, and even the Sunday School teacher, who finds the promise, at least, of liberation, peace, and harmony, in a pop song on the radio. "It's like all the greatest people in the world, jumping up and feeling fine," he sings. "It's the sound of her trying to find something to like." It's one of the biggest, most sentimental lines in pop's book-- "her life was saved by rock and roll"-- but the bleakness of the songs that precede it, and the desparation Cocker brings to it, make the cliché seem earned. It's Jarvis's challenge now, if he really wants to make a go of going solo, to try and write a few more songs that might be worthy of Big Julie.
