Monday Morning

It’s songs like this – especially this song, as a matter of fact – that make me wonder how Different Class ever got designated as Pulp’s crowd-pleasing album. The jittery, nervous ska rhythm (I’m fairly certain it’s the only time the band tackled that genre) is a perfect match for Jarvis’ lyric. It’s one of his most sardonic, desperate works, a savage and concise catalog of newfound adult freedoms becoming mind-numbing, soul-killing routine. It’s an anthem for anyone fresh out of college, with a go-nowhere job to support a pointlessly busy, alcohol-soaked social life. The fatalism is crushing, but totally dead-on. “Is this the light of a new day dawning?/ A future bright that you can walk in?/ No, it’s just another Monday morning.” Explain to me again how songs from the subsequent album like this were considered a departure.

This TV performance contains some alternate lyrics. Enjoy.

Acrylic Afternoons

This song, along with “My Legendary Girlfriend” and “Babies” probably did most of the groundwork for establishing Jarvis as the unlikely sex symbol (a status he’s still trying to live down). But this tale of an amorous couple set against a tableau of suburban normalcy also alludes to something less physical. Like many similar Pulp songs, there exists the aching need for escape, as two lovers try to find a way out from the doldrums. Jarvis just wants to stay with her, “lying under the table together with you now.” It’s the tension between this desire and the one behind the song’s innuendos that gives the song an unmistakable edge, making it of a piece with the band’s body of work.

“Acrylic Afternoons” also serves as the name of one of the finest Pulp fansites around.

My Body May Die

A true lost classic, “My Body May Die” points to a tantalizing, fascinating direction the band never fully explored. Jarvis hands the bulk of vocal duties over to long-running chorale group The Swingle Singers – the song is in fact credited to “Pulp vs. The Swingle Singers.” Underneath a bed of eerie harps and synths, the group intones a weave of verses, ruminating on love and loss. Jarvis emerges mid-way to intone “You thought I would leave you/ I could never leave you/ Wherever you go I will be by your side,” over and over. It never sounds like a threat, but it certainly is a most uneasy kind of reassurance. The performance is one of the band’s most powerfully subtle – take note of Nick Banks’ delicate drum work, miles away from the hard, arena-honed rhythms latter-day Pulp specialized in. It’s one of the band’s most challenging works, lyrically mysterious and musically unexpected. One hopes that Jarvis (if not Pulp as a whole) someday decides to pick up where it left off.

The song was written for the 2000 British television series Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (a remake of the late-‘60s show of the same name). Songs like this indicate how rewarding a Deluxe Edition of We Love Life could be.

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.

They Suffocate at Night

On the final track of Freaks – and the last single by that lineup of the band – the minor-key indie fumblings suddenly gain the low-rent grandeur the band must’ve been striving for that whole time. It’s hard to say what exactly is different, but there’s a melancholy that arises here – different from mere dreariness – that’s quite affecting. The arrangement is quite perfect, mixing organ, plucked violin and a steady, delicate rhythm. Jarvis’ vocals still lack confidence and certitude, but even that’s not really a drawback. The lyrics detail love gone horribly wrong once again, but every line is well-chosen, filling in the right details while still leaving room for ambiguity.
During the filming of a video for this track, apparently the band had some sort of falling out and “broke up,” although soon enough, Jarvis and Russell Senior would put together a new Pulp, eventually bringing Candida Doyle back into the fold as well. Rather miraculously, the video is available on YouTube.

Weeds

… and we’re back. The opening track on the final Pulp album, “Weeds” attempts to cover a lot of ground, not always successfully. The opening acoustic guitar riff hints at a more pastoral direction from the band, but within a few seconds, we’re back in vaguely Different Class-like anthemic territory. At any rate, both musical decisions seem chosen to move the band as far away from This Is Hardcore as possible.

The song finds Jarvis veering back into “Mis-Shapes” territory, a little strange given his vocal disdain for that song. Here, he wants to write about different kinds of misfits as beleaguered but undaunted. He can’t be faulted for lack of ambition – attempting to tie confused young urbanites and council estate residents into his central botanical metaphor. But something’s missing; the song is rousing and melodic, but it doesn’t quite gel with Jarvis’ concepts. Frankly, “Mis-Shapes” did it better.

The Day After the Revolution

At the very end of This Is Hardcore, the band makes an abrupt turn from matters of debauchery and depression to socio-political concerns. It’s so sudden, this change of tact, that a casual listener could easily neglect it. But it’s there, and the soured, world-weary but wiser tone that closes the album only gives it more depth. Like many left-leaning Brit musicians of the time, Jarvis quickly lost hope in Tony Blair’s “New Labour” brand; “The Day After the Revolution” takes solace in the belief that the most significant paradigm shifts will occur in secret, unbeknownst to the masses. Similarly, you can hear the track – despite its hard-charging, echoing guitars and drums – signify the band’s retreat back to the fringes, away from celebrity and all its bummer after-effects. It’s the anti-“Mis-Shapes” in a way.

Now all the breakdowns and nightmares look small
Now we decided not to die after all
Because the meek shall inherit absolutely nothing at all
If you stopped being so feeble, you could have so much more

“Yeah we made it,” Jarvis exclaims at the end, and the relief is palpable, especially given the nightmare scenarios of the previous songs. He then launches into a monologue (“Sheffield is over/ The Fear is over/ Guilt is over…”) that echoes John Lennon’s “I don’t believe in…” litany in “God.” On the UK version of TIH, the song then concludes with nearly ten minutes of a single synth note, punctuated by a single “bye-bye” from Jarvis near the end. It may have been a stunt instituted by La Monte Young fan Mark Webber. If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have the U.S. version, the song fades out before all that. Instead we get a top-notch bonus track, “Like a Friend” – although for the purposes of this blog, we won’t be treating that as a track from this album.

(Note: I’m moving this month, so my time and/or internet will be limited. So Music From a Bachelor’s Den will be on a lighter publishing schedule for April. I fully expect things to go back to normal once May rolls around.)