The new album from Jarvis Cocker isn't a Jarvis Cocker album. It's the debut from Jarv Is, the new band featuring the ex-Pulp guy. The record, Beyond The Pale, drops today on Rough Trade, and it maps out territory fairly far removed from that explored by the Sheffield legends that Cocker counted as his own not so very long ago. The album is oddly hypnotic in spots, with Cocker here nearly lost in this new persona, which is really an updating of his old persona but that's another story.
"Save the Whale" is clever and unsettling, but "Must I Evolve?"> is propulsive and close to some of the material heard on Pulp's This is Hardcore (1998) album if you must have a point of comparison. Elsewhere, "House Music All Night Long" is Barry White by way of a lanky dude from Sheffield, all creepy seduction stuff, while "Swanky Modes" is more languid and introspective. Only "Children of the Echo" feels entirely fresh, shades of any number of recent Ian Svenonius projects creaking throughout this one.
Jarvis Cocker seems to have intended Jarv Is as a break with his past, but it's best heard as an extension of that stuff. By making this a band, not a solo album with a band, Cocker at least acknowledges the need to have this be about more than just his quirks. In that sense, it's a vast improvement on his earlier solo work, frankly, and a fairly coherent attempt at crafting something that owes much to earlier indie, but which feels far, far removed from the genre as it's currently defined on both sides of the Atlantic.
Beyond The Pale is out on Rough Trade today.
More details on Jarv Is via the official Jarvis Cocker website.
[Photo: Rough Trade]