After Rushing the Stage, Cocker Tones It Down

As Pulp's creative engine, Jarvis Cocker composed sexy, class-conscious dance hits like "Common People" that defined Britpop and the '90s in U.K., but his first solo effort, Jarvis, is the soundtrack to the domestication of a Britpop darling. While his songs have always reeked of cynicism and incisive social criticism, the ultra-jaded tracks on Jarvis seem to have been written by someone who's just tired of caring.

Pulp, the band that made Cocker a household name and television personality in England, dissolved in 2002-since then, Cocker has experimented with electro-pop duo Relaxed Muscle and recorded with Maryanne Faithful and Nancy Sinatra. The man once arrested for rushing Michael Jackson's performance at the 1996 Brit Awards now lives in France with his wife and son, and recently made headlines by performing with The Weird Sisters in the last Harry Potter film. No longer does Cocker celebrate the rebellion of smoking fags and playing pool-instead, he contemplates the dangers of a boring evening in with a bottle of wine and an internet connection on tracks like the lounge-appropriate "I Will Kill Again." The album's 27 second intro, "Loss Adjuster," is just a few bars on the piano, but it gives the impression that these were songs composed at a Grand in Cocker's living room, rather than scribbled down in a drunken frenzy of inspiration.

That's not to say that Cocker has lost his edge-rather, suburban dystopia has replaced working-class England as the object of Cocker's scrutiny. With a gothic choral and string arrangement, "Disney Time" offers a deliciously perverse comparison between pornography and animated children's movies. On "Fat Children," a high-energy rock song with a chugging drum and bass line, Cocker snarls about a murder committed by "maggots without the sense to become flies." "From A to I" predicts the fall of the British Empire at the fault of a complacent, empty population with the genius couplet, "Not one single soul was saved/ I was ordering an Indian takeaway." The album's hidden track, thirty minutes after the last song, is a vitriolic pop masterpiece: "Cunts Are Still Running the World" would fit on any Pulp album.

Serious Jarvis fanatics will appreciate the comparatively simpler arrangements and the greater emphasis on Cocker's voice, a smooth tenor doused with his unmistakable accent. Jarvis remains full of his trademark bravado, and he is at his best when he belts out the heavy-hitting chorus of "Black Magic," one of the album's standout tracks. Musically, Cocker has taken inspiration from a variety of American sources. "Heavy Weather" is reminiscent of a country song, while "Tonite" has backing vocals and a melody that could be sung by a barbershop quartet, and both somehow blend seamlessly into his synthetic, Britpop aesthetic.

The literary lyrical style for which Cocker is famous-complete with plot, character development and drama-is too seldom employed. The aforementioned "Fat Children," is sung from the perspective of a ghost with the refrain, "Fat children took my life." Similarly, "Big Julie" is a character sketch of a lonely teenage girl who finds solace from the salacious glances from her Sunday school teacher in pop songs. Although Cocker is a natural storyteller, many of the songs on Jarvis are simply well-executed, safe pop tracks like "Baby's Coming Back to Me," in which references to world peace have unfortunately replaced the salacious sexual details one once expected of Cocker's writing.

Despite the cynical picture Jarvis paints of modern life, the album's last official track, "Quantum Theory," leaves Cocker alone with an acoustic guitar dreaming of a parallel dimension where everyone is happy. Though the song ends with Cocker whispering, "The force that binds the universe together: /Everything is gonna be alright," it's hard to tell if that's even a possibility in Cocker's world.