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.)

Born to Cry

This song can be found on the soundtrack to the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts rom-com Notting Hill; but only on the UK version. And, oh yes, the song is not heard at any point during the film Notting Hill. What else do you need to know? Pulp’s then-touring guitarist Richard Hawley receives a co-writing credit on this song with the band, and you can hear glimpses of his subsequent, well-regarded career as an Orbison-esque balladeer. Listening to “Born to Cry,” you can also tell the band was between the heavily produced This Is Hardcore and the slightly more organic We Love Life. It’s certainly not the most distinctive, idiosyncratic song Pulp ever wrote, but you can feel Jarvis work through the power-ballad clichés, just so he can deliver his ode to the chronically morose: “Darling, you and I/ We were born to cry.”

She's Dead

Another lush yet grim ballad, one that catches the band in something of a transitional period. The execution is more expert than something like “Little Girl (With Blue Eyes),” yet we’re not quite in the polished, near-bombastic territory of, say, “Sylvia.” The band’s not at the point yet where they can afford a real string section, but the synthesized backing just makes the song more poignant, symbolic of something that’s nearly obtainable, but just out of reach. Herein, Jarvis mourns over a broken relationship so thoroughly that it doesn’t matter to him whether she is in fact deceased or just out of his life. It’s all the same to him at this point.

Mis-Shapes

At some point, Jarvis grew to regret writing this rallying cry of a hit single. The curdled after-effects of Britpop-era celebrity rendered this song hopelessly naïve in his mind. He so disliked this song that he pointedly left it off the band’s 2002 Hits compilation, causing a minor kerfuffle amongst some die-hard fans. Of course, I think he doth protest too much. Not only is “Mis-Shapes” a genre-defining anthem and perfect album opener, but it’s also filled with some real melancholy. I’ve always heard a desperate catch in Jarvis’ voice on lines like “Oh, we weren’t supposed to be” and “Brothers, sisters, can’t you see?” When he delivers the chorus’ pay-off line – “We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of/ That’s our minds” – for the last time in the song, he’s followed by a dying synthesizer squall, as it to signify that there’s much, much more to this story. And indeed, the rest of Different Class goes on to show just how uneasy young adulthood can get for even the most defiant of nonconformists.

The story doesn’t end there. At some point in the 21st Century, a popular New York DJ night called “Mis-Shapes” began. I have no concrete evidence of my own, but in some circles the night has became fairly synonymous with hipster douchebaggery. For good or ill, the photograph book commemorating this night features some text from Jarvis, who DJed there along with Steve Mackey early on. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that victory can be pulled from even the most dire of events, and maybe all this will have softened Jarvis’ stance towards the song “Mis-Shapes” by the time Pulp launch a reunion of some sort.

Watch the video for the song here.

Inside Susan

The second part of the Inside Susan song series – part one was covered here. The title song, if you will, is another peppy, synth-driven pop song, this time serving as backing for one of Jarvis’ spoken monologues. He writes about teenage parties and make-out sessions with sense of sadness. By now, we’re getting a sense of Susan as someone with a promise that is never adequately realized. But overall this isn’t one of his most compelling stories, with a few metaphors that uncharacteristically go clunk.