In a word...

Check out This is Hardcore sound clips at
The Planet of Sound.

By Daniel McGarry

But we get spoiled by whatever glimpse of incomprehensible brilliance we might catch. All too often this is a brilliance so blinding it obscures whatever brings it on. Getting up to rewind to the brilliance gets tedious, so we settle for the album as given, and learn to see the brilliance in the whole, the brilliance of the slower build, the tougher to catch. And we learn to like it that way, and thus does Pulp earn its fellow travelers.

This is Hardcore was released, appropriately enough, during Lent, the liturgical season during which Christians worldwide have traditionally been encouraged to engage in acts of self-deprivation in solidarity with the suffering of Jesus Christ. Pulp's latest, as well, asks its listeners to join them in a exercise of traditional English self-deprivation. And if we're in that right mood, there couldn't be a better soundtrack for it.

On This is Hardcore, frontman Jarvis "I am not Jesus" Cocker and pals offer the ultimate solidarity of our species, the inescapable experience of death, which is all too often accompanied by aging. For a band that couldn't ever leave all the dark crayons in the box, writing a whole album about the unavoidable fate of shiny humanity is in character, but makes for an even more challenging listening experience than usual. The tempos rarely escape the geriatric ward, making everything sound basically sad. However, this has no effect on the ultra-slick pop constructions we have come to expect from Sheffield's finest and most impenetrable, even in their beguiling simplicity.

The slow stuff that absolutely smothers itself on drowners like "Seductive Barry" works best on the first single, "Help the Aged," featuring the most falsetto Cocker possible climbing a minor-key mountain of a chorus. "I'm a Man," a rare (for Pulp) gem of a driving song, shakes off most of the molasses to show off even more of Cocker's talents. "Like a Friend," a completely-out-of-place bonus track from the Great Expectations soundtrack, tackles the more familiar theme of obsession as well as anyone in recent memory, and burns brighter than anything else on This is Hardcore.

Brilliance.

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