Your Sister's Clothes

"Your Sister’s Clothes” features the sisters from “Babies” four years on. Now the younger sibling finally gets her revenge for earlier years.
--From the liner notes to The Sisters EP

Without that synopsis, you might have trouble connecting “Your Sister’s Clothes” to Pulp’s breakthrough song, even though “Babies” precedes it on The Sisters EP. Nevertheless, the rather threadbare, enigmatic plot (a string of innuendos, really) of “Your Sister’s Clothes” cannot detract from the song’s power, nor the overall brilliance of The Sisters EP. Here, the band pumps up a kitchen-sink epic to almost ridiculous heights, handily avoiding queasy melodrama. Candida Doyle and Russell Senior are in especially fine form here, concocting an ingenious arrangement of keyboards and vari-speed violin. Their instruments seem to move in symbiosis, working together to cover all the right frequencies and plot points.