Review: Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis

Thanks for the head-up CH!

It's a sad era for Britpop when you see your favourite bands of the mid 90s fade away and disperse into a number of solo side projects. From Blur we get Graham Coxon's solo projects, the Gorillaz and more recently, Damon Albarn's The Good the Bad and the Queen. Suede was reincarnated as The Tears, and so on.

Pulp, along with these superstars of the Britpop era, faded, leaving Jarvis Cocker to do a couple of collaborations, most notably the contribution of 3 tracks to the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire soundtrack, before finally settling to produce his debut solo effort.

I'm tempted to compare Jarvis to Graham Coxon's recent solo effort Love Travels At Illegal Speeds. Both albums feature a bespectacled songwriter writing chirpy songs reminiscent of the buzz and enthusiasm of the original mid-90s Britpop boys.

The album starts off with a quick piano intro, before bursting into the familiar croon in Don't Let Him Waste Your Time, the first single off this album. It's catchy, it's sweet, but somehow, it just doesn't hit enough special notes to become a masterpiece like Common People.

In this album, makes use of soft jangly guitars and generous splashes of percussion almost in the same way Pulp used to. The old tried-and-tested style essentially, and this is a good thing to me, having missed Pulp for a long while.

The first half of the album's fast and melodic, keeping your feet tapping while Jarvis makes morose lyrics such as Heavy Weather and I Will Kill Again sound so damned happy.

The second half of the album becomes more experimental, with hits such as Fat Children (it's as catchy as Do the Hippogriff!) and Disney Time (we're back to Jarvis's old sardonic self - "How come they’re called “Adult Movies” when the only thing they show is people making babies filmed up close?"). And with misses such as Big Julie and Quantum Theory that would probably be better off just being notable B-sides rather than lacklustre album tracks.

All in all, it's worth several listens, more if you were into Pulp in the first place - this album is proof that Jarvis Cocker IS Pulp, complete with the dark cynical humour and catchy tunes. Nowhere as catchy as Graham Coxon's Love Travels At Illegal Speeds, but at least this is Pulp reincarnated. No doubt about it.