It's a bit too insipid but it does have its charms. But it should not be on the lp ahead of HisnHers or Seconds or Street Lites.

Here's one: whilst all are good, Room 29 is the most worthwhile of Jarvis' post-Pulp albums.

Ian wrote:

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Here's another: "Room 29" does absolutely nothing for me.

I have tried...

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 Ditto. I struggle to get to the end of it.

The first Jarvis album from 2006 is by far my favourite thing he's done post-Pulp.

This Is Hardcore is the best Pulp album (best album)
Joyriders, Pencil Skirt, and Underwear are all awful

-- Edited by Ste on Saturday 28th of December 2019 03:37:09 AM

timahall wrote:

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Ste wrote:

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This Is Hardcore is the best Pulp album (best album)
Joyriders, Pencil Skirt, and Underwear are all awful

-- Edited by Ste on Saturday 28th of December 2019 03:37:09 AM

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I disagree with pretty much all of this. This Is Hardcore, whilst I love it, is my least favourite of the Island albums (and I prefer Separations too). And Underwear I could easily single out as one of the best songs of the entire 1990s. The mood, the lyrics and the absolutely divine instrumental passages. That song is Pulp to me. Joyriders I also adore, and to a lesser extent, Pencil Skirt.

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Tend to agree too. On Pencil Skirt, for years I thought it DC's weakest moment, but over time I've come to rate it and Sorted and Something Changed are the two tracks I've become bored with. And if I was choosing, say, five songs that were emblematic of Pulp, there may well be room in there for Underwear. Maybe. Certainly in a Showcase Ten, or a gateway playlist to introduce a newbie to the joys of Pulp.  

superchob wrote:

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Maybe. Certainly in a Showcase Ten, or a gateway playlist to introduce a newbie to the joys of Pulp.

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I'm sure something similar's almost definitely been done before, but that'd be a great topic, almost as revealing as this one to our varying tastes, and Pulp's variety

Me too. The reunion version is more like a remix of the original, perhaps unsurprising given it was produced by an electro/dance musician.

Jarvis appeared to be on a roll around 99/2000. A pity it was only partially captured by We Love Life. I wonder if the band played all the demo'd songs from 99-2000 to Scott Walker and he helped whittle them down.

-- Edited by Eamonn on Wednesday 8th of January 2020 04:40:35 PM

Please keep in mind I'm from Texas and don't get much Pulp over here so I don't know if these opinions are unpopular or not, but here goes:

Their best live concert was Auto Festival which features the best ever renditions (studio or live) of Happy Endings, Babies, Lyndhurst Grove

Live extended version of Live Bed Show is 10X better than studio Live Bed Show

His N Her's was their best album but needed better post-production. Nearly every song sounds better played live than the studio version.

The Fear and Sylvia are top-10 Pulp songs

This is Hardcore starts of great and runs out of steam

Go easy on me!

Dont be mad at me, but i really dont like Common People, its so long and they play only 3 notes again and again and again. This is mine unpopular opinion

You couldnt put out the This is Hardcore cover art these days. 

-- Edited by cutcopy on Friday 15th of May 2020 01:57:58 AM

(Sorry, I understand that reviving long-dead threads is an oft frowned-upon practice. When browsing old threads, I remembered seeing the moderator saying that 'bumping' threads was actively encouraged if anything, so I'm hoping I might get away with it just this once. Apologies.)

Anyway, I have a few opinions, I don't know how unpopular or popular they are but anyway...

'Razzmatazz', despite being a huge fan favourite, is a little too mean-spirited for me to like it all that much. I prefer 'Lipgloss', which is similar thematically but much more sympathetic. All that "you started getting fatter" stuff - it just makes him sound nasty, and I get that's partly the point but there's more sophisticated 'Jarvis as mean-spirited enacter-of-revenge' songs than 'Razz'. There are some nice lines, and the instrumental is well-crafted, though also not quite on par with other songs from the time (Babies, Pink Glove, Lipgloss, DYRTFT, She's A Lady before Buller butchered it). The sleeve is lovely, though.

This Is Hardcore, the album, is in many ways the most conventional record the band ever recorded. Some songs make strong statements but don't really back them up. I really like 'Sylvia' but it doesn't have much Pulpiness, and while 'Dishes' has charm to match its cheesiness, 'TV Movie' gets too bogged down in self-loathing. 'A Little Soul' is a similar case, but scores higher through an improved arrangement and better lyrics - should never have been a single though. And while 'It's A Dirty World' makes enough of a statement that I think it'd strengthen the album if it were there... eeeeh, I just personally don't like it very much. Sorry.

'Help the Aged' too, while deserving praise for its ambitious lyrical matter which is sometimes deftly articulated ("You can dye your hair, but it's the one thing you can't change"), is just a bit too unlovely for me. It doesn't quite work as a lead single... it's a bit gloopy. Lyrically, part of it is too on-the-nose (the Sid James-ness of "Give us all a feel"), part of it is incredibly sincere and compassionate, part of it is wry and works well (the line about the elderly "sniffing glue"), it's an odd mix of seriousness and irony, and it doesn't all work. It's clever how the song pretends to be oldies' easy-listening music, then explodes into this big chorus, but by the third time round that chorus has worn a little thin. I can understand why Russell didn't like it; it's a daring enough statement but there's something a little cheap in there, something a bit formulaic. But mostly, I just find it unappealing - not in the sense that I'm trying to ignore the death in it, or anything like that... sort of the opposite, to be honest.

And weirdly enough, I think part of this is to do with generational perspective.. I suppose I could be wrong on this, but it feels a bit like back in the 90s, it was a relatively new social phenomenon for the majority of the people to live to reach a ripe old age - the UK had been through two world wars in the last 80 years - and since then, a bit of the novelty has worn off. There is a huge media oversaturation of death-and-gloom on our screens, of morbid media, midlife crises, 'we're-all-going-to-get-old-and-be-miserable' and to the extent that I think Gen Z has had it hammered into our heads that we're, yes, all going to die at some point (honestly with the climate emergency, it's the 'reaching old age' part where there's a dangling question!) and 'Help the Aged', then, doesn't sound like it's saying anything really new. To be honest, I find this stuff sounds a bit too theatrically overwrought, a bit too oh-woe-is-me despair, especially out of the mouth of a 33 year-old. I can appreciate its ambition in reminding young, drugged-up Britpoppers that they too will develop wrinkles/need crutches et al, but it hasn't aged very well in our death-obsessed society. I don't know if it's because of 9/11, if that caused the cultural change, the saturation of media to be so concerned about death, or pushed our youth-obsession into overdrive... all those Pixar movies that riff upon death and take themselves so seriously, all the moribund Coldplayisms of the 00s charts, and overriding it all the sense of all-encompassing social and cultural decay in concert. I'm really fed up of the fetishisation of youth, of being young, I think it's something that young people broadly really fixate on these days, they don't need to be reminded. I think that's where I really wish Pulp had gone, maybe elsewhere on This Is Hardcore - they were older popstars, they could've attacked the nascent glorification of young-ness and its dictation of what's fashionable coming before all else (and maybe this sort of statement, the whole 'FACE IT YOU ARE YOUNG' business, is what's missing from The Day After the Revolution).

I mean, I respect it. I respect "Funny how it all falls away", a great line and an ironic one (because it's not very funny at all). But it's flawed in a way that it's a bit harder to stand up for than all the preceding singles under Island. Nowadays, it's harder to get behind. Basically, after coronavirus and everything, it's just a little too consciously miserable for me. We all have moments where we feel the sort of things discussed in 'Help the Aged', that's maybe where the song's power comes from/where its success lies, but to me it's just a bit too on-the-nose, a bit too musically conventional, a little bit rote for reasons that aren't really its fault, it's just being stood up in a different and later cultural environment. Still, it can teach us stuff, even if it's looking rough.

Steve and Nick = best rhythm section of any band around the Britpop scene. Fight me.

Russell doesn't get enough credit in the public eye, and without him being responsible and organised, Pulp would never have made it. At the same time, I don't entirely sympathise with his thoughts on Pulp's musical direction, even if I agree about 'Help the Aged'. It seems to me that he wanted them to make music more like 'F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.' - and then they did exactly that! (In all fairness, there's stuff in Stephen's interview I'm writing up about this. Russell is quite magnanimous about it all, really.)

'Someone Like the Moon' is one I always skip, yet I also always feel a little sorry for it when I see people singling it out. It's a nice little mood piece, and helps balance out the album... perhaps I'd still cut it for 'Street Lites' or 'His 'n' Hers', I'm not sure, but it do feel a bit sad for it? I don't know why, really.

In general, This Is Hardcore suffers as an album from being a bit too steeped in Jarvis's self-hatred. I don't know why I'm rubbishing it so much - I do really like it!

'Weeds' should've been a single instead of 'The Trees', which might actually be the least marketable song on the album (aside from 'Wickerman' and 'Roadkill').

And finally... I really, really like 'Mis-Shapes'. This feels like an unpopular opinion! Owen Hatherley criticised the song as a bad application of class warfare to target "the wearers of different jackets", but god, why can't we just have a fun song slagging off bullies and intolerant people? The idea of a song for geeks and weeds and all sorts, rising up against the people who've made things more difficult for us, just being who we are... Well yeah, maybe we do have more of our minds, actually! And even if we don't, we're allowed to think it from time to time. It's a guilty pleasure, a shout-out-loud triumph where you get to revel in being an outsider instead of othered against your will, and I love it and I think it's brilliant, it can touch so many people in a healthy way, it might be juvenile but that's OK. And far from being a rehash of 'Common People', it's brilliant, a big stomping arrangement with lovely theatricality. "Brothers, sisters, can't you see? The future's owned by you and me!" Perfection. It's not my favourite song on the album, but it's an unapologetic triumph. To many people, Pulp have always been mis-shapes in the public eye. This is part of who they are, and I'm glad they've accepted that rather than continuing to disown the song. (And it was so good at Bridlington...)