Thursday 31 January 2008

Retrospective - Pulp / Different Class / 1995


So I missed Pulp. I don’t mean emotionally, but I think I was steered away from them. I am not exactly sure why, but it might have something to with the same reason I also had to force the hand to even begin to listen to Jamiroquai. My father is a muso, and only listens to music by Chris Rea or other blues artists. Occasionally his tastes get wider and excompass something slightly more new, like Keane or Muse, or even (rather shockingly) Lostprophets.

Pulp, then, was a bit of an enigma, and only last year did I get a hold of Different Class. I suppose this might be a proper review, or even a discovery, but it is with out a doubt a good album. I notice how great the lyrics are, how different the music itself, and how annoying it must have been to be Jarvis Cocker at a time when Britpop ruled the charts and bundled in with those louts.

Blur and Oasis were the south and the north, whereas Plup were the outsiders. The underdogs, or even, the alternative. They are alternative in everyway possible way – especially with the album of tracks about Disco 2000 (the great pop song) and the rather ludicrous I Spy, which changes halfway through, starting as a ditty about girls and that, until… well, her husband walks in. Oops.

To be frank I don’t think I would have got the lyrics back then – they are similar to Morrissey in the meandering way that they mimick real conversations but have that poetic charm, that slight subersvion and that mad but unhinged but also perfectly real feel about them

But, mixed in with the fantastic lyrics, is the brilliant music which takes the songs to the air and the radio. It is an album for summer evenings, after having a bottle of wine and sitting back in the patio, with a beer and the sun slowly burning away, the heat cooling down and that brilliant summer smell of a garden that has just been hosed down.

These memories should be from my childhood when I listened to this album, but as an adult I get the songs, and you should to. Here is Disco 2000and I Spy. Two of the best on the album which give you a good look at the style of the album.

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