I imagine they will start to filter in quickly from the newspapers and music websites in the coming days. Ironically, the more easily-dated publications like monthly music magazines have already covered the release, two months or more ago based on the original schedule - four stars in Mojo, FIVE in Q (whose staff, sadly, may currently be working on its last ever issue unless a buyer is found).

Here's a decent write-up from the FT.

https://amp.ft.com/content/037ed8eb-72ca-4953-b527-d1d8308d655b?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR3PeOCNx-D-FwQeOiiZU6jsOFs_HPHge-F7oaELPRI-7Zw4E0PsYNdYXUk

Have to smile at something that spends large parts of its word count on the context of Jarvis' fame/resume of his later career and then just a couple of closing paragraphs on the actual new album which they are reviewing and profess to like a lot! Guess they need to take into account the typical FT reader who may be more of a casual arts fan, in cashmere socks and boat-shorts.

That link looks a bit odd. Here's the text:

Jarvis Cocker finally adapts to life after Pulp with his new JARV IS album, Beyond the Pale

Themes of biology and extinction recur throughout the new release from Cockers project

Among the glorious run of singles that Pulp released at the peak of their success in 1995 was Sorted for Es and Wizz, a satirical account of a trip into the English countryside for a massive rave. Jarvis Cockers narrator scores drugs from a blitzed bloke in Camden Town (Londons scuzzy indie-rock citadel), gets hammered at the rave and loses his friends. By morning, amid the wreckage of the bacchanal, he has a hollow feeling growing inside him. Oh, what if you never come down? Cocker croons in a fragile voice. The song fades away, leaving the paranoid thought suspended in the air.

Back then, Cocker and his bandmates were at the centre of the mad whirl of Britpop, when the sort of guitar bands that count Camden as a spiritual home had a licence to swagger with maximum intoxication around the national stage. Pulp grabbed the moment as enthusiastically as any, yet were also able thanks to Cockers witty, observational lyrics and a perfect balance of musical forces to skewer the absurdities of the era. Fame was there to be enjoyed, even though the Sheffield bands hinterland in independent music and art schools led them to understand that fame was also to be distrusted.

That note of tension couldnt be sustained. Pulps 1998 album This Is Hardcore was the comedown, a brilliant dissection of celebrity culture, fake glamour and self-loathing. It indicated an endpoint for the band (one more, lesser, album followed in 2001). It also left Cocker adrift. His solo career since Pulp has been a thing of fits and starts. There have been flashes of songwriting quality, but also a sense of hesitancy. He has worked as a radio DJ, made television programmes and written a book that is due to be published in October. His public profile has remained high, but strayed towards national treasure territory a half-gratifying, half-neutering form of acclaim, like a mature version of the Britpop fame that he relished and detested in his Pulp days. 

 

The album has a purposefulness that has been lacking from Cockers music for a long time

Beyond the Pale is his first album since an underwhelming outing with Canadian musician Chilly Gonzales in 2017. It finds Cocker, 56, at the head of a new band, whose name, JARV IS, resembles a personalised car number plate, like a luxurious frippery for a bored rock star. But the results have a purposefulness that has been lacking from Cockers music for a long time.

Opener Save the Whale initially comes across as a Leonard Cohen pastiche, with Cocker intoning mordant lines about libido and debility in a gravelly sing-speak. Backing vocals from a pair of women, harpist Serafina Steer and violinist-guitarist Emma Smith, have a half-mocking, half-consoling tone, a very Cohen-esque touch. But the song acquires force as it progresses, adding layers of sound around its central see-saw rhythm. Cockers lyrics move outwards, beyond the pale, as he sings, towards themes of survival and adaptation. What at first seems an act of homage Cohen is one of Cockers heroes evolves into its own form of musical life. 

Themes of biology and extinction recur throughout the album. The tracks, with Cocker, Steer and Smith joined by bassist Andrew McKinney, electronic musician Jason Buckle and drummer Adam Betts, were almost all fleshed out at gigs before being recorded, an evolutionary approach to songwriting. Sometimes I Am Pharaoh has a surreal, psychedelic edge, but the wildness isnt overdone. Am I Missing Something contrasts a playfully catchy electronic beat with guitars that shiver and shimmer, unresolved elements as Cocker ponders the mysteries of existence. 

MUST I EVOLVE? is a psychedelic mock-epic that travels, via a driving krautrock beat and swirling organ, from the big bang to an acid house rave. Swanky Modes revisits Camden, the milieu where the protagonist of Sorted for Es and Wizz got his pills before his own rave. This time the mood is minor key, a hushed ballad about people getting older but failing to change with the passing of time. The shift in style from the 1995 song shows that the opposite here is true of Cocker. With Beyond the Pale, he has finally managed to adapt to life after Pulp. 

Beyond the Pale is released on Rough Trade