Pulp: More. – US – CD [2025]

1. Spike Island
2. Tina
3. Grown Ups
4. Slow Jam
5. Farmers Market
6. My Sex
7. Got to Have Love
8. Background Noise
9. Partial Eclipse
10. The Hymn of the North
11. A Sunset

So Pulp’s “More.” dropped two months ago,” but I’ve been busy paying out travel costs from this month through Rocktober, so buying new music is not a high priority. Except for the fact that one of those “Rocktober” trips I’m taking is to see Pulp and Sparks in Atlanta on September 4th and 5th! So two weekends ago I was jolted from my torpor by that gig’s proximity and thought I’d special order the new CDs from Pulp [and Sparks] at my local emporium so I can be up to date on the new music from both beloved acts.

I was looking up their phone number on the web and saw that their website has a handy new stock inventory feature and well bust my britches… they had both CDs for the asking, so I drove over to Harvest Records and bought them! This is so far removed from how things usually happen in my local stores over the last 10-15 years, but a Monk can be thankful for small miracles. The first single, “Spike Island” was certainly up to the old Pulp standards! And yet, I see that it got a UK Pop chart placing no higher than a single week at [sputters] …number 98???!!!

That’s a shocking fate for a record that frankly plays like a Top 10 opus from the band’s imperial period! And possibly indicative of the Coming Tribulations. The Synare hook played by Adam Betts in the intro was deliciously garish and prepped the senses for the Disco overkill of the song [you’ve got to love those handclaps on the backbeat]. With Andrew McKinney’s bass strategically fattened with delay to widen the rhythmic footprint of the song.

And Great Googley Moogley…! The slide guitar that was the glue that held the song together was courtesy of Mr. Cocker himself! I remain astonished at what Candida Doyle managed to wring from just a Farfisa organ on this track and throughout the album. This one, once heard, exerts a tight grip on my brain to dominate the Mental Walkmen® all day long.

The next track was completely different as “Tina” painted a self-portrait of erotic obsession with someone with whom the narrator had less than even a scant interaction with. They instead erected castles in Spain over nothing at all; all couched in a Morricone swirl of dramatic strings and what sounded like a bevy of horn samples. Making the track sound positively ripped from 1968. Perhaps showing that even a quarter century later, the band still bore the imprint of Scott Walker, who had produced their last album prior. The dreamy backing vocals of the choir certainly evoked that proto Adult Contemporary sound that was moving in parallel to the youth culture of the late 60s; unnoticed by the youths…but not their parents.

Speaking of whom, the next tracks was “Grown Ups,” a jaunty number based on a bouncy chord that rambled through a sardonic revisit of the maturation theme of “Disco 2000” albeit now from the perspective of a 60+ year old Jarvis Cocker. Here’s a Mighty Monsatic Fact® for you; Cocker is apparently one week older than Yours Truly, if the internet is to be trusted. The misty-eyed youth-looking-forward-to-maturation viewpoint of the earlier single has been supplanted by a more problematic conclusion that the desire to cling to youth is so strong that now nobody wants to grow up. The embittered spoken middle eight [which went on far more than eight bars] drily delivered by Cocker was a classic of its kind.

A change of tempo arrived in the form of “Slow Jam;” a self-referential title if ever there were one for a track constructed minimally from evanescent sustained strings and bass ganks drizzled with the odd pizzicato pluck. Sarafina Steer of the JARV IS project contributed to the music here. Next came the piano and string laden ballad “Farmer’s Market.” Wow! Mr. Cocker hit the nail right on the head with this novelistic impression of his relationship with his second wife as he claims that he’s finally allowing himself to access his feelings and get out of his intellect when writing now. The wealth of telling detail that makes up the lyric impresses this listener but when I hear shift from “Ain’t it time for living” to hear him conclude with “ain’t it time for feeling,” Ye Olde Monk gets a little misty eyed.

Next: …My Sex…Waits For Us