Jarvis – Further Complications

Jarvis - Further Complications

It’s just not a very conceivable story, is it? This man playing basically the whole 1980s in an unsuccessful band, being on the dole to boot.

Then, when his band finally is on the up, a fight with the record label pushes their album right out of any picture it was possibly in. That this lanky fellow, of all, becomes a Britpop sex symbol is just bizarre. Now Jarvis Cocker has grown a beard, but he still is the same unlikely hero that he was then, only now with two solo efforts to his name. This second effort is entitled Further Complications, and as sketched above, his life has been quite complicated enough already, and he has probably earned the right to do whatever he wants. Even if that means teaming up with Steve Albini, who was on no one’s list as a Jarvis producer.

Albini, namely, is a rocker, not essentially the main quality you would associate with Jarvis. Then again, he does come storming out of the gates with the title track. At one point Jarvis is genuinely just screaming, how about that for an Albini influence? The song is followed by ‘Angela’, arguably the most straight-forward and one of the least impressive songs, and henceforth promoted as a single. If those two songs are quite a bit of rock, in comes ‘Pilchard’, which is a mostly instrumental song really not seen from Jarvis since ‘Styloroc (Nites of Suburbia)’ on the Gift Recordings. Another instrumental surprise will come when ‘Homewrecker’ starts with Pulp man Steve Mackey playing a nifty bit of sax (he played on The Stooges ‘Funhouse’ you know).

After that ballad you get three songs that are perhaps straining it a bit. Especially ‘Fuckingsong’ and ‘Caucasian Blues’, while not bad songs per se, tilt the album perhaps too much to the rock side after having witnessed quite the diversity. ‘You’re In My Eyes (Discosong)’ closes the album in an epic, almost nine minute take on what is reminiscent of the ‘Rolling Down The Hills’ song by Glass Candy. Jarvis injects so much melancholy in the disco, as well as a bit of meta-fiction (“And I don’t want this song to ever end/because I know if it did, you would disappear again”), that this might just be the best song on the entire album.

Even though the album was recorded in America, the Englishness of it shines through on many occasions. Self-depreciation is present especially in ‘Leftovers’, but you can also find irony, sustained absurdism, and things knowingly nonsense on the album. Also rooted in Jarvis are those dole years in Sheffield, churning out some deliciously working class lines like “I want to refrigerate this moment” on ‘Slush’ (because really, can you imagine Judi Dench saying something like that about her leftovers?).

Not all that surprisingly, Jarvis has made a record different from any of his previous works. His last effort was more a storytelling journey, and Further Complications as a whole is far removed from either the house/disco of Separations, the Britpop years, or the last two Pulp albums (for the sake of the man’s legacy we’ll just stay silent about his first two Pulp records). Jarvis is at the top of his game here, whether it is singing-wise or as a lyricist. True, ‘Angela’ is not a cracking single, and at a certain point you might start to get a tad weary of the rocky edge of some songs. At that moment though, that disco song starts, which lures you back in remembering what you were already thinking in the first place: that this album is made by an artist of considerable talent, and one who has enough gas left in the tank for people to already wonder in anticipation what the man is going to do next.

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