Jarvis Cocker
Further Complications
(Rough Trade)

With his new salt-and-pepper-streaked facial hair, Jarvis Cocker looks more you’re your eccentric chemistry professor on his new album cover than the goofy Britpop archetype who led Pulp and (lest we forget) invaded a Michael Jackson dance number at the Brit Awards. But don’t you dare suggest that the man is mellowing in his middle age. For his second solo effort, the follow-up to 2006’s Jarvis, Cocker set up shop at Electrical Audio studios with anti-producer Steve Albini (The Stooges, Cheap Trick, The Pixies, Nirvana and so on and so on), which says it all, really.

From the dumb, filthy riffs of the opening title track, it’s obvious that, on Further Complications, Cocker is going for what Albini once eloquently described as ‘big-ass vicious noise’. Cocker’s raging carnality worked wonders for Pulp, but I suppose the gritty textures here make sense; in the retro rock ditty ‘Angela’, the barroom brawl number ‘Fuckingsong’ or the monstrous racket of ‘Homewrecker’ (a stone’s throw from the original Batman theme, with Blues Brothers theme sax over the top from Steve Mackey).

But just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it works. A lot of these tracks – especially the mutated surf rock jam ‘Pilchard’, over which Cocker jabbers, “You pilchard! You pilchard! You pilchard!” – tend to go nowhere fast. It’s the less boisterous moments, where Cocker has more breathing space, like ‘I Never Said I Was Deep’ and the whimsically soulful ‘Leftovers’, which have the most impact. These also happen to be the tracks that feature the worthiest additions to the Jarvis Cocker Phrasebook of Deadpan Sing-Spoken Wit (“I met her in the Museum of Palaeontology / And I make no bones about it”).

The two back-end numbers, ‘Slush’ and ‘You’re In My Eyes (Discosong)’, which together make up nearly a third of the album’s running time, are an exquisite closing suite because they don’t, like too much else here, mistake brashness for brawn. The closer especially, with its cheesy disco sample and pulsating bass, as if Cocker was dropped into the middle of a revival of The Wiz (what a thought), is a better ending than the album probably deserves.

“Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown,” Cocker once sang, and he was right. Coming from that one-time hero of bohemia and common people, Further Complications is as awkward and disappointing as that new beard.

Darryn King