Album review: Jarvis Cocker

Published on Sunday 17 May 2009 19:52

JARVIS COCKER: FURTHER COMPLICATIONS **** ROUGH TRADE, £11.74

CURRENT favourite moment on Jarvis Cocker's second solo album? That'll be the one 40 seconds into the fourth song, Leftovers. Jarvis, having found himself eyeing up an attractive lady in Paris's Natural History Museum (this really happened), attempts to win her over with the opening gambit: "If you wish to study dinosaurs, I know a specimen whose interest is undoubted." (This bit is made-up, I think, but possibly not).

It's a good line, self-deprecating but gallus, and he knows it. He also knows it's probably no way for a 45-year-old man to be introducing himself to a strange woman in an art gallery. Which is why, immediately afterwards, he's included the sound of a bell clanging in a boxing ring. "Round one to Jarvis, lads!" it seems to say, while also saying, quieter but still audible, "yes, I'm well aware of how pathetic this is".

It's a moment that sums up the general mood of Further Complications. At 45, his Britpop glory days long behind him, Cocker may be feeling like a dinosaur, but for now he's decided, musically at least, to strut like T Rex while he still can.

So this – for the most part – is his glam rock album. The fast songs pastiche Marc Bolan or Slade; the slow ones pastiche vintage Bowie. There are loud, clattering drums, oodles of reverb, saxophone solos, and a gang of butch male backing singers who gruffly agree with everything Jarvis is saying. Jarvis himself grunts and screeches like a horny, unreconstructed, hairy-chested rock prizefighter. It's as faux-1970s as Life on Mars.

Except that, rather like John Simm in that TV series, sensitive Jarvis is an ill fit in this testosterone-heavy world, and too smart and self-aware a writer to delude himself otherwise for kicks.

So, lyrically Further Complications is full of complexity. It's an album where the voice may be whispering seductively, but the words it is saying are things like "I know I ain't no eligible bachelor. This is no mouthwatering proposition." It's an album where the strutting, territory-staking opening number compares life to – wait for it – a carrier bag (because of "the feeling that the straps will snap"), and where, whenever sex rears its head, frustration and failure are not far behind.

In less subtle hands, this could turn into hamfisted parody, as Life on Mars did at times. But what Cocker has done is much cleverer than that – he's used music traditionally made by swaggering, sexed-up young men to soundtrack thoughtful lyrics exploring the inadequacies hidden behind that irrepressible sexual urge – and, in particular, the way these are increasingly exposed as men get older.

At its most direct, this means a song like Leftovers. "I want to love you while we both still have flesh on our bones," croons Jarvis to the woman in the gallery of paleontology. It's a joke, in the way that almost every other line in the song is a joke, but it's poignant, because of the way Cocker shows that behind the pose is genuine desperation. Later in the song he compares himself, the male predator, to "a vampire who will faint at the sight of blood" – a potent metaphor for the way men both prey on women and want to be saved by them, but run away when they realise being saved might actually involve changing. It's one of the sharpest, most damning lyrics he's ever written.

I Never Said I Was Deep comes from a similar place, alternating between grovelling apology ("My morality is shabby, my behaviour unacceptable") and cocky defiance ("I'm not looking for a relationship, just a receptacle.") ending up with something like resigned self-loathing ("If you want someone to share your life, you need someone who's alive").

If this makes the album sound dark, it is. What makes the darkness bearable is that it's also extremely funny, as well as compassionate. And, in the end, after the self-loathing and the lashing out at the evils of men, Further Complications still believes in romance. Having got glam rock out of his system, it finishes with two tremendous songs unlike anything else on the album. The first, Slush, is a slow-burning song about a city briefly, poetically transformed by the weather. "You turned this place into a winter wonderland," he sings. He doesn't have to spell out what he really means.

Finally, on You're In My Eyes (Discosong), Jarvis channels Barry White for a sweet, touching song about two lovers reunited. Suddenly, you can't help but notice, the backing singers are women. "You're in my arms, I feel your warmth. I don't wanna lose you again," he sings, sweetly. And you hope, with all your heart, that he doesn't.

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CRITIC'S CHOICE

Sublime Frequencies Tour,

Stereo, Glasgow, 22 May

THE Sublime Frequencies label, specialising in music from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, presents a dynamic double-bill of Group Doueh, a family ensemble from the western Sahara who play in the hypnotic Sahrawi/Hassania style, and Syrian folk pop legend Omar Souleyman. Plus Sublime Frequencies DJs.

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