Fuss Free wrote:

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Quote:
What exactly were you expecting the album to sound like? I'm just curious because it's exactly what I thought it would be: half-serious social commentary set to MOR tunes. The songs aren't particularly catchy, and you won't hear any of them in a club, but the lyrics are good, and Jarv's personality drives the album.

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Fuss Free wrote:

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Quote Andreas:
The fact that two of the songs are old ones written for Nancy Sinatra just makes me think that Jarvis is lazy and that he hasn't put all the effort he could have done into the album.

You're right. Jarvis is lazy. I understand he recorded the entire album live, presumably just so he could just get it over with as fast as possible. At some point you realize that Jarv's laziness is part of his appeal. He'll never be accused of trying too hard.

-- Edited by Fuss Free at 03:49, 2006-11-04

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I thought I read somewhere that different bits of the songs were recorded in different studios. Backing tracks in Sheffield; vocals in Paris. Something like that, anyway. It doesn't sound like a live-in-studio recording to me, really. I doubt he was singing with a live string section on "Big Julie," for instance.

josta59 wrote:

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I must be the only big Jarvis fan who's only heard the bonus track. Wikipedia says this album won't even be released in the UK until Nov. 13. How many of you have heard this legally? I'm fine with waiting; it makes it more fun. And if there's any musician in the world I want to support 100%, it's this one.

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I guess no one has heard it legally unless they have an advanced copy.

I will buy it anyway, but that doesn't stop me having a good listen first.

As for supporting 100%, I guess having the entire Pulp/Relaxed Muscle back catalogue, and attending god knows how many gigs with Koko to come, makes me a mere 99% now I've heard it early  

Fuss Free wrote:

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And I'll buy a used copy someday.

Which raises the question, do artists ever profit from the resale of used CDs?

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Never really thought of it like that.  I only buy used/second hand if I can't get it ordinarily.  In fact, so called limited editions hack me off as you are forced to buy them (of course I do, and often second hand as I'm not always privvy to the initial sale).

Don't like buying 2nd hand as you never know what condition it is in.  And I have got a couple of things via eBay/Record Tape Exchange which were so bad I had to but them twice so hardly a bargain.

Nowadays, I think that if an album is deleted, it's fair game for, ahem, illegal copies.

All that said I will buy Jarvis as soon as I can (those re-issues can wait, I have the originals and they'll do for now)

Eamon- thanks for the updates. My thoughts are that NME and Uncut just have higher standards and better taste. 7 out of 10 sounds about right to me.

Ok. Rant time.

Littlesaint- When it comes to buying used records, I'd say it's 40% cashflow, 60% moral. As I see it, the record industry is scamming consumers. These days it costs a label around 8 cents to press each CD, yet they sell them for more than 100x that price. Whilst I understand there is an overhead cost to producing a record, I know people who've produced absolutely brilliant records with only the spare cash they scrounged together from waiting tables. Seems to me any band who spends a half million dollars to produce their album had better show us a work of absolute staggering genius in order to justify the expense. More often than not, that money ends up dusting somebody's nose or stuffing somebody's veins.

Why should so many bands slave away, doing odd jobs and recording in their scant spare time whilst these "superstars" prance around flippantly wasting everyone's time and money? It almost goes without saying that the Library Assistant who records music because it's her passion will turn out something better and more interesting than a "career band" anyway. If I ran a record label, I'd cut prices on CDs in half. I'd cut the fat, and tell bands they'd better deliver some songs or go deliver some pizzas. You know: work... like everyone else.

If I had more money I probably wouldn't care as much, but any good band should know a thing or two about poverty, and they should respect my situation as much as I respect theirs.

Rant over.

Jarvis
Rough Trade

Jarvis Cocker must remember the golden age of pop stars, the pre-punk era of Bowie and Ferry and men from Mars (or Hull) who were beamed down to Earth via Top of the Pops every Thursday. But even shiny young heroes age and have to find another role. Not everyone can model old man’s duds for M&S.

No wonder Cocker seemed so lost when Pulp gradually ground to a halt. He was already in his thirties when he rode Britpop to fame, and his true contemporaries are writing Bafta-winning comedies or presenting chat shows. Music remains a young man’s game. So it really is a pleasure to find that his first solo record can bear comparison with anything he’s produced. 

After some recent dabbling in the comedy electro-punk of Relaxed Muscle and songwriting for such icons as Nancy Sinatra and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cocker has rediscovered his own strengths. With the guitarist Richard Hawley and bassist Steve Mackey, from his former band, he seems revived, while his sardonic wit is as sharp as ever.

The brilliant Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time, Sheffield Spector at its finest, has been retrieved from Nancy Sinatra and rearranged to Cocker’s satisfaction. The tinkling Baby’s Coming Back to Me is now heartbreaking and sarcastic simultaneously. The tense Black Magic very deliberately echoes Crimson and Clover, the Tommy James and the Shondells US chart topper from 1968.

Such a blatant steal is unusual. The beauty here is generally in the details. So the comically evil ballad I Will Kill Again features a piano part reminiscent of Bowie’s Changes.

Morrissey might have enlisted Tony Visconti to add a touch of Starman to his last record, but this is smarter. Hawley is Cocker’s Johnny Marr too. His Velvet Underground-inspired twang sprawls all over the much quoted From A to I as Cocker glumly declares: “They want our way of life, well they can take mine any time they like.” 

Maybe it’s a consequence of middle age — he’s now 43 and a father — but Cocker just can’t hide his dismay. He mocks Daily Mail attitudes, yet on the thumping Fat Children (took my life) he sings of how “the parents are the problem/ giving birth to maggots without the sense to become flies”. But adulthood doesn’t have to be negative. On Tonite, the one song that sounds more Hawley than Cocker, he warns his own camp followers that “the night belongs to lovers, so show some respect”. 

Cocker retains his empathy with the misfits. The lovely Big Julie (presumably a nod to his reclusive friend Scott Walker’s Big Louise), another song for, and about, one of the outsiders, wriggles with frustrated potential.

His frustration is very adult though, that of a man who can’t believe he’s again seeing the idiocy that he grew up kicking against.

The hidden track Running the World (nasty folk, according to the obscenely catchy chorus) was apparently inspired by the very fact that Live 8 needed to be staged. Plus ça change, as Cocker, now resident in Paris, must surely believe.  

STEVE JELBERT