[…continued from last post]

The high melodrama of “She Gets Out The Scrapbook” was a tour de force of songwriting and lyric, that gave us a glimpse of High Pulp years before the band themselves were capable of rising to such lofty heights. It built up gradually but my the song’s midpoint, the band’s firebox was fully stoked and it had become a thing a awe and beauty. With Hamilton Lee’s drum powerful drum patterns and Sally Still’s bass lines ascendant in the coda.

Gears shifted appropriately for the plaintive ballad “I Miss You.” Its smoky intimacy guided only by delicate brushwork on the drums and Maya Gilder’s piano until the time in the coda where Phil Todd’s mournful sax joined up.

The bouncy Motown tempo of “Make Believe I’m Him” altered the energy flow of the album arc yet again even as it belied its embittered lyric. Again, it’s difficult to believe that Jarvis Cocker would not have written this song six years in the future, but even Pulp would never have thought to have Martin Drover adding such an insolent trumpet solo to the coda.

Then the band stepped off of the ledge and leapt into the midair embrace of “Let Me Feel Your Pulse.” The point where the band fearlessly tried on those jazz threads they had been eyeing all through the album thus far; deciding that Jump Blues would be just the thing to try. The eerie thing about the song was that while it seemed to instrumentally be a lost track from an album like “Joe Jackson’s Jumping Jive,” Jim Irvin’s delivery here was actually channeling the high register vocal sound that Scott Walker would not evince until 1996’s “Tilt” almost a decade into the future. Hearing that voice applied to something not reeking of existential dread, but instead imbued with such liveliness fills my ears with cognitive dissonance. I loved how Irvine doubled and duetted with himself throughout the song.

“The Sound Of The Bell” was a frantically thrashing, chaotic piece of Pop but the from-out-of-nowhere, buttoned down Jazz middle eight, complete with vibraphone solo, was just another example of how this quixotic band liked to play. The portentous synth drones and organ fills reacted gamely against the shuffling drumbeats of “Escape Into My Arms.” The layers of jungle-like percussive detail as the instrumental middle eight raised the energy levels to fever pitch before the ringing guitar of Tim Whelan only entered the song at its climactic fadeout.

Then the album really ended on a berserk note with “Pierre’s Fight.” Spending half of its life as a late night piano ballad with a clearly narrative lyric as Pierre was having a bad night as his lady stepped out on him. As he was listening to a boxing match on the radio the song jumped rails abruptly to frantically goose the song’s tempo and lubricate the piano so that anything could happen on that keyboard. And then the song regained its composure to end on a dramatic note.

We now had a complement of released and not so released bonus tracks to flesh out the experience of “The Wrong People.” The string section isolated from the big single appeared as a minute long “Brilliant Fragment” from the 12″ of the same. Then, two demos recorded after the album but never released revealed the band to be still honing their vibe, albeit coupled with a poppier sensibility that many of the album songs sported. The arrangement details here were excellent for demos, with full arrangements and organ solos manifesting.

Then the B-side to the two singles appeared. “Too Gus” was an eccentric piece that sounded like roller rink music with its evocation of the titular war-era music hall performer Gus Elen. But not half as eccentric as “Turnupspeed.” Which with its handmade percussive devices and jazzy élan it almost ended up existing in a Tom Waits space if Tom had been working with Herbie Hancock. Boz Boorer played the clarinet! The piano was vivid but in the end the offbeat percussion won the day.

“Me, You And The Name” was a song of two minds, the rambling, reticent verse structure and the powerhouse chorus that flattened the rest of the song in its wake. “It Continues” was actually the B-side to their single from the next album, “One Step Behind You” which was licensed from Arista/BMG for the purposes of this CD, so the producer [Dermot James – thumbs up] must have really wanted to see this in the package. It’s another finely etched song with a typically dense Furniture arrangement.

Wrapping up were the two extended remixes form the album singles. “Brilliant Mind” opened with an extended buildup with vibes brought out front and various percussion and sax ad libs building up before the song as we recognized it got underway at the 2:00 mark. The sax solo at the middle eight really stretched out here and afterward the strings that we’d heard as “Brilliant Fragment” were added to the mix here. “Love Your Shoes” opened with Irvin a cappella for half a bar but remained familiar until the drop that led into the extended middle eight with more vamping at the song’s climax with a quick fade of the music bed leaving Irvin alone in the spotlight as he entered the song. Very symmetrical.

I can detect the strong spoor of Scott Walker all over this album, and it’s possible that Jarvis Cocker was also strongly under the influence of Walker as well, separately, but the songs here really feel like mature Pulp songs in every way, shape and form. Only with Jazz-adjacent instrumentation instead of New Wave leanings. I just took a look at the review of the “Some Kind Of Wonderful” OST and when discussing the re-recording of “Brilliant Mind” at the time, I said much the same below.

I think that this would have been one of the big albums of 1986 for me but for one salient fact. I never, ever saw a copy. There were 20,000 copies pressed and after they sold out, Stiff deleted the album and filed for bankruptcy at much the same time. As I mentioned up front, I never saw this, or any other Furniture record in the import bins of Central Florida at the time…or even now to this day. I recall seeing the cover only when getting the Cherry Red email in 2010 with the extremely striking cover art [“Cupid + Psyche 1986”] by Calum Colvin. It’s a cover that had I seen it, I daresay I would have bought the LP on the sight of it alone.

The artwork consists of a painting of the subject matter by Colvin applied to a whole environment, in this case a room full of furniture, and photographed from the correct angle where the objects recede and the painting can be scanned by the eye to be the foreground, even if parts of it are in the background. It’s a captivating technique and from the look of his website, Colvin has been exploring this intersection of painting, environment, and photography for the whole of his career! He was fresh out of college at the time he painted the Furniture sleeves in 1986 [including “Love Your Shoes”] but by 2001 he was an OBE awarded artist.

As for Jim Irvin, he pulled a reverse Neil Tennant and following his tenure with Furniture that ended with the band breaking up after their second LP for Arista in 1990, he moved into music journalism with runs in Melody Maker before becoming Mojo’s inaugural features editor. His pen has taken him to major outlets like Time Out, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian as well as books on musical topics. Since 2001 he’s been a writer for hire for other acts like David Guetta, Groove Armada and…Lana Del Rey. So he got some hits under his belt in any case, but I daresay none with the crackle and snap evidenced in the first Furniture album. Now I only need the second one. Wish me luck in finding an affordable copy.

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