Jarvis Cocker’s greatest challenge at the beginning of the new
millennium is making people forget he was the poster child for Britpop
at the end of the old one. Cocker’s accomplishments with Pulp in the
’90s thrust him uncomfortably into the limelight (not to mention
tabloid copy), so he’s spent the last seven years of his band’s
open-ended hiatus involved in a variety of fascinatingly diverse
projects (fronting the Weird Sisters in the Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire film, collaborating with Marianne Faithfull and
Nancy Sinatra, starting a new band called Relaxed Muscle) in an effort
to distance himself from being pigeonholed.
Cocker’s debut solo album, 2006’s Jarvis, was largely seen as
a return to Pulp’s early pop form with more darkly complex and deeply
felt lyrical concerns. With his latest solo effort, Further
Complications, Cocker gets back to a big guitar sound and Britpop
swagger without completely abandoning Jarvis’ subtlety. The album’s title track jumps out of the gate with tribal guitar fury
and visceral simplicity, as well as Cocker’s longstanding Bowie
fascination. The understated and delicately dissonant “I Never Said I
Was Deep” shows that Cocker is never far from the gifts that vaulted
him to the peak of the heap a decade ago. Further Complications may not make fans swoon like Pulp’s 1998 This Is Hardcore or
even Jarvis, but Cocker seems infinitely more interested in
conjuring up some musical mayhem here than in padding his already
impressive catalog. — Brian Baker
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2009.
