thanks, the words elegiac strings and Church choir Sunday setlist overfed my hype.

Still no mention of Partial eclipse, so mysterious track...

Not sure what's going on here. I must have activated some sort of profanity filter . Leave it with me. 

Update: I cannot see a setting for a filter so I certainly didn't activate it in the first place. Hmmmmm. 

""You can readily picture massive crowds singing back the soaring bridge We thought that we were just joking / Trying dreams on for size / We never realised / Wed be stuck with them, for the rest of our natural lives just as loudly as they would that famous refrain in Sorted for Es and Wizz.""

I don't remember that feeling when I heard live versions of Farmer's Market, the studio one must have changed quite a bit. The live I remember is far more calm than Sorted.
yep, overhyped

In case it doesn't work:

 

Pulp: More review an unpretentious, honest and frequently funny comeback

After a 24-year gap, Pulps new music sticks to the style fans love them for: a touch of disco and Serge Gainsbourg-style European funk

If at the Britpop Comprehensive class of 1995 Oasis were the hard nuts, then Blur were the snarky sixth-formers, Supergrass were the naughty kids and Elastica were the scary girls smoking behind the bike shed. Meanwhile, Pulp were the misfits. Though Jarvis ****er and his gang were too style-conscious to be dismissed as nerds, you do feel they might have spent a lot of time in the art room or the chess club, before running home as fast as they could for fear of being beaten up by the local thugs. Such a background provided ample material for ****ers Alan Bennett-style social observation classics Common People and Do You Remember the First Time?, leading to something that doesnt usually happen to misfits from Sheffield: global fame.
Pulp clearly werent built for the level of attention they got after capturing the spirit of the era with their masterpiece, 1995s Different Class. The wilfully uncommercial This Is Hardcore in 1998 was both an attack on fame and an attempt to divest themselves of it, which certainly worked. When Pulp marked their initial demise with a greatest hits collection in 2002, it peaked at a less than chart-busting No 71. As ****er sings on Spike Island, an anthemic, oddly melancholic reflection on that period, which opens More, Pulps first new album since 2001, the universe shrugged, then moved on.

 

Pulps return to the studio sticks to the musical style fans love them for a touch of disco, Serge Gainsbourg-style European funk, a general sense of being pop but one step removed with a nostalgic feel, as befits a band whose members now find themselves in their fifties and sixties. Over an orchestral pop backing on Tina, ****er spots a former almost-girlfriend on the train and imagines what might have been. Do you remember walking past me in the snow, 14 years ago? he asks with a hint of desperation, before unrequited lust makes his rhyming and scanning ability go out of the window entirely. I forgot what I was going to say to you! he yelps. It is witty, a bit creepy, and brimming with sexual frustration.

 

Grown Ups goes further back, to a time in 1985 when ****er fell out of a window in an attempt to impress a girl and, after being released from hospital, hobbled over to his girlfriends home. Ill be the dad and you be the mum, and well make out we know what weve done, he sings, before confessing that he still doesnt feel like a grown-up, even now that hes worrying about wrinkles rather than acne.

Sex does appear to be on ****ers mind a lot. Without love, youre just jerking off inside someone else, he sings on the old fashioned Eurovision-style ballad Got to Have Love, while My Sex must be one of the least sexy songs about sex ever written. There might be people who are titillated by a 61-year-old man commanding, You show me yours Ill show you mine, hurry cos with sex were running out of time, but I dont know who they are.

 

You wonder if this is all just Jarvis ****er solo material under another name, given he is the leader of the band and writes the songs, which seem to be an expression of his essential being. But there is a different tone here than on ****ers solo albums, something rooted more in the everyday, which must come from the steadying influence of his fellow long-term members: Nick Banks on drums, Candida Doyle on keyboards and Mark Webber on guitar. Factories lying empty, manufacturing emptiness, he observes on The Hymn of the North, a quiet, sentimental, rather moving love song aimed not just at a person, but the north of the country and its postindustrial realities.

More ends with A Sunset, a song firmly in the Seventies singalong pop tradition that influenced ****er in the first place, but filtered through the Pulp personality. Id like to teach the world to sing, but I do not have a voice, he (sort of) sings, an admission of his position as a pop star but not quite, an outsider who found his way inside and still isnt sure if he likes it there or not. I was born to perform. Its a calling. I exist to do this, shouting and pointing, he announces on Spike Island. After a 24-year gap, More is Pulps acceptance, musically, lyrically and sartorially, of their place in the universe. That must be why it sounds so alive, so unpretentious, so honest and so frequently very funny. (Rough Trade)

 

The reviews are coming thick and fast now. New edition of Uncut is out - this is a great review by the same guy who did a similarly-sized one for the deluxe editions in 2006.

Biggest shock in this one is the news of James Ford's illness. I had no idea, hopefully he will be OK...

 

from my Rock & Folk

-- Edited by Bookmark on Friday 23rd of May 2025 07:00:36 PM

I will, maybe tomorrow, or the day after

Merci! Some beautiful expressions there that probably sound even more poetic en francais.

And another one...Jarvis gets around. In a New York deli with Rolling Stone this time - some nice comments about his bandmates.

Plus, a lot of discussion on the song "Grown-Ups". It feels like some of the lyrical ideas have been recycled from the unreleased song he recorded for Further Complications, "The Night They Left Me Out Of The Home"

https://pulpwiki.net/Jarvis/TheNightTheyLetMeOutOfTheHome 

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/pulp-reunion-jarvis-****er-1235347053/

Oh FFS, the word filter is sanitising the C0ck in his surname, so links with his name won't work. It's the main story on the homepage today here -

https://www.rollingstone.com/

 

-- Edited by Eamonn on Saturday 24th of May 2025 10:41:16 AM

 

Looks a bit like a poster for a Wes Anderson film. Pretty neat though, huh? Also...the sofa is quite a Pulp object, isn't it?

Yeah, I think I'd buy this as a poster for framing.