Album Review: Pulp, ‘More’

On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed. More isn’t about disappearing for two decades and finding a way to return; it’s about coming alive as a means of carrying on.

1. Spike Island

The song that confirmed the release of a new Pulp album is also the one that best captures its essence. Without much of a concept to go by, Cocker identifies only “a feeling/ Not a voice in my head/ Just a feeling.” Strings swoon as he slides into the soaring chorus, built simply off the words a DJ kept repeating while opening for the Stone Roses’ chaotic yet legendary concert at the titular venue in 1990. Cocker referenced that very show 30 years ago on ‘Sorted For E’s And Whizz’, but here it comes tangled with a sense of wariness, the thin line between anticipation and an anticlimax, nostalgia and remembering. “I was born to perform! It’s a calling! I exist to do this: shouting and pointing!,” Cocker declares on the next pre-chorus, a reminder to himself he could very well shield with a bit of cheekiness. But his performance embraces the glory of returning to be nothing less than what already live by – or because.

2. Tina

Ostensibly, ‘Tina’ is about a woman the narrator has never met – really, it’s about every woman he’s crossed paths with but never gotten to know, several fantasies compiled under one name. It’s in the same tradition as Cocker’s older songs about women named Paula, Sylvia, or Deborah, yet this time the disparate time and place undercuts the obsession rather than amplifying it, the band’s brooding arrangement deliberately holding something back. “I got to live,” he mentions off-handedly, “And I ain’t living on my own.” It could’ve been her, though, he seems to suggest – it could have been anyone. If there’s something unnerving about the way his imagination lingers on that one person, it’s compounded by the plethora of possibilities all of us simply never pursue. When Cocker sings “Tonight I have been thinking about Tina,” he’s thinking about that, too.

3. Grown Ups

It all begins with “a feeling I didn’t understand,” a recollection that reframes the pre-chorus of the album’s opening single. If to be young is to be filled with feelings we can’t articulate or comprehend, then growing up is predicated on the lie that we one day should be able to – so that we spend countless more playing pretend. What’s the good in trying so hard to get ahead only to find yourself exactly where you began? Where’s the fun in acting like a grown up when everyone’s too busy to even acknowledge the performance? “I know it’s all about the journey,” Cocker ultimately sings, “Not the final destination, but what if you get travel sick/ Before you’ve even left the station?”

4. Slow Jam

Just a single line needs to be crossed for to go “from all that you could be/ to all that you once were.” Cocker’s narrator is referring less to the course of one’s life but rather love, the kind that takes years to build but can shrivel away so easily. Cocker’s lyrics wouldn’t land as hard without his bandmates striking precisely the right tone, as funky as some of his lines are suggestive, and as sneakily wistful.

5. Farmers Market

Cocker boils it all right back to a feeling, but this might be the first time we really get to feel it, too. ‘Spike Island’ and ‘Got to Have Love’ were stirring singles, but ‘Farmers Market’ is on a different emotional level; Cocker has hardly ever written about romance with this clarity before. “There was no coat-check/ So we wore our dreams out on the dance floor,” he sings, before envisioning the moment he could taken an entirely different path, suggesting it’s all a matter of stopping yourself to say, “Hold on!” – working around the business of life to actually live it, for a change. “Ain’t it time we started feeling?” both dreamers wonder. As a listener, you can’t help but be excited for the record’s second half.

6. My Sex

More goes from a feeling “that’s got much nothing at all to do with my mind” to “My sex is out of its mind,” which is funny and strange and definitely Pulpy. Cocker defines the titular concept ambiguously at first, before turning darker on the second verse, where it becomes about something bigger – and more in line with the flow of the album. Yet for a Pulp song called ‘My Sex’, the irony is that it leaves something to be desired.

7. Got to Have Love

That something materializes on ‘Got to Have Love’, More’s glorious second single. It’s not just about the ability to sing that four-letter word, but to say it with a straight face, chin up, knowing exactly what you mean. Can you repeat a timeless, universal refrain without so much as a scoff? It’s the spoken-word section, naturally, that gave me goose bumps as soon as I heard it: “You sit on your backside for twenty-five years/ And you hedge your bets and twist and bust/ And try and fail and work on an album and build a jail/ And lock yourself away,” he confesses. All for the one thing that’s now at the heart of More – and the one thing on it that’s hardly ever veiled.

8. Background Noise

A jarring shift – or rather, sequencing decision – that zeroes in on the humming possibility of losing that love as soon as you’ve learned to embrace it. James Ford does a remarkable job on the production, elegantly evoking the buzzing and ringing that Cocker sings about without overcrowding the mix. He’s somewhat removed from it, you can tell. But it still stings.

9. Partial Eclipse

Pulp drift into the ethereal space that marks More’s final stretch by ruminating on the heartache of the previous song a little longer. Wordplay and metaphor provide comfort, but you wonder where Cocker is headed.

10. The Hymn of the North

Originally composed for a 2019 play called Light Falls, the song is in many ways the genesis and centerpiece of More, though the first time they performed it – at one of their Sheffield homecoming shows in 2023 – could have been the last one. It could have been reserved for that audience: “Never forget your northern blood.” But the studio version, as evidenced by a huge string section – not to mention Brian Eno and his family on backing vocals – aims higher. It shades things in the style of Scott Walker. It’s ballad as test of endurance as much as a simple plea to stay in touch, odds be damned.

11. A Sunset

On ‘Farmers Market’, a sunset is the background to a romance just about to flourish, the thing that lights up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; here, it’s “just a sunset” our narrator was rigged into paying for. It’s still beautiful, of course, and a classic image to ride the album off. “I’d like to teach the world to sing/ But I do not have a voice,” he sings, as if also accused of some money-making scheme; it’s just music, after all, and it’s everywhere, all the time. His own voice shrinks at the word time; he’d much rather offer the world that. His own thing, this album, must come to an end. We can only bear witness, and that’s a choice worth taking.

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