If you’ve never listened to PULP, I feel sorry for you. Give “Spike Island” a listen to see what you’re getting into. Jarvis Cocker tells us, “I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I exist to do this / shouting and pointing,” which could have been a lyric to any PULP song over the past 40-or-so years. The upbeat, danceable groove they lock into feels just like it did in the end of the last century. The vinyl sounds fine, though I didn’t spring for the 2xLP on 45 RPM. The mini’ed images on the cover look to be the four core band members in black and white from the “Different Class” cover, while the back has a fuller complement of PULP in a slightly larger scale. You’re not surprised they put a lot of care into the design of the album.
In September 2024, Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw PULP at the Aragon in Chicago. It was their first time in the city in nearly 30 years. They were without Russell Senior and Steve Mackey (RIP). They were playing a slightly bigger club than the Brixton Academy, but we’d be fools to miss them. The set was as magical and wonderful as ever, but snuck in there was a new song, “Spike Island.” Jarvis introduced it as being possibly part of a new album. Being at a gig is not always the best time to hear a new song from a band as lushly arranged as PULP, but I wasn’t about to turn up my nose at the new sonic offering. It didn’t sound too different from the rest of the set, for better or worse.
We’d seen them on the 2011 reunion tour in Brixton as part of our honeymoon and the show was excellent. They had done a summer of European festival gigs and closed out the year with two shows at clubs in London. Notably, they said the reunion was only a tour and not an indication of a new creative instinct brewing within the remaining members. That’s fine. I got to see a band I’d only learned about in 2007 in a small club. I never thought I’d have a chance to see them. No new music? Fine!
It’s kind of wild that this record exists. The past few years have seen new albums from British bands such as The CURE and IRON MAIDEN that also formed in the 1970s. Those two bands’ most recent efforts came at a slow, but expected pace. Neither of those bands had broken up or gone on hiatus. PULP, on the other hand, has been on and off the reunion cycle since their long hiatus in 2001, and have only released a single track, “After You” in 2012. As a leftover from the “We Love Life” sessions, it seemed like that would be it for Jarvis Cocker et al.
We all should be so glad that “After You” wasn’t the last we’d heard from them. The promo material with the record explains that it’s been nearly 24 years since the last PULP album. Given the hiatus and other projects they’d been involved in, it really was a surprise to find out they had an album’s worth of material to share. Jarvis explains that it is “the shortest amount of time a PULP album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.” That is a really cool way of putting it. They’d had the time off to let some old ideas simmer and new ones bubble up; the result is as delectable as anything they served up at the height of their notoriety.
Do you remember the first time? Do I need to tell you what PULP sounds like? (Are you sure?) This album works as an entry point if you’re not familiar. They hit all the usual defining features of their sound: powerful, disco-y arrangements that make you want to shake your moneymaker; too, too close to the mic spoken word parts; lyrical concepts and phrasings that are just on the right side of being too clever for their own good; and songs about sex.
If you’re lucky, you get all of those in a single song, such as “My Sex.” I laughed in spite of myself at the line “I haven’t got an agenda / I haven’t even got a gender.” That’s just the kind of cleverness I mean. In the next song, you’ve got the line that “without love / you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” There you go. A disgusting way of phrasing of an idea that is fundamental to a healthy relationship. You really do have “Got to Have Love.”
(As a treat, Jarvis will “spell it for you, yeah, it goes L-O-V-E,” so you’ll have a pleasant memory of “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” toward the end of the song.)
There’s times when I don’t want to listen to “We Love Life” because the ornate instrumentation is too much for me. The velvet-gloved slap of “Different Class” is unbeatable. Moments like “Farmers Market” recall the excesses of “We Love Life,” yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There are many parts and many contributions to this record. Pictured in the insert are Jarvis Cocker, Nick Banks, Mark Webber, and Candida Doyle. There are no songs with just the four of them; Andrew McKinney plays bass in place of the late Steve Mackey. At a minimum, there are credits for strings, percussion, and electronics on the songs. So, nothing entirely unexpected, and that’s fine by me. There’s a taste of some of the darkness of “This is Hardcore” on “The Hymn of the North,” which has a recurring chord progression that evokes plenty of sadness. That feeling goes over the top with the eventual imploring request to “please stay in touch with me / in this contactless society.” Feeling bad can feel so good. The whole b-side to the record feels like a journey through the phases of a relationship, from that moment when “Something Changed” to the eventual result of “Babies” who will grow into adults who leave home to start it all again.
As the liner notes indicate, “This is best that we can do.” and there’s no shame in trying when you know you’ve given your all.
Let’s finish with the observation that “We Love Life” ended with “Sunrise” and “More” ends with “A Sunset.”
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