Jarvis Cocker: Further Complications

My landlord is a Royal Navy pilot, he flies those big grey helicopters which carry the ominous observation globe on their undercarriage. The base isn’t far from here and I often see them flying overhead. When I am outside smoking a cigarette I imagine him zooming in on the weeds that are slowly prying apart his patio slabs, then looking at me. “That’s right!” my internal dialogue proclaims, “I lied. I smoke. But I am outside!” I am tempted to wave, but it seems like the wrong thing to do. Once you start playing games with your paranoia and acting as if you in a film you have made a very real choice whether you realise it or not. The momentum may well carry you to the Badlands. 

If I were Jarvis Cocker, I might write a song about it. But hey, I could do it myself! Why not? The above situation just occurred, and the chugging Albini Pulp of the title track was just powerful enough to distract me from my insecurity as well as provide a soundtrack to the moment; an experience which sums up this record pretty well, in an abstract way. There is not much evidence on this album that Cocker has experienced much to distract him from the minutiae of his own closed circuit insecurities, which you don’t need to read an interview to realise are rooted in a recently deflated marriage. But there are a few moments where the waves settle and he can see some kind of horizon, however uncertain he is if the storm is coming back his way for another brutal swipe. 

“I could be your teddy bear” he whispers over the bedraggled, mid-paced rock of ‘Leftovers’. “This ain’t no mouth-watering proposition”. That’s true Jarvis (elusive double negative or not), it’s not, especially when you put it like this. Meeting the object of his presumably extra marital desires in a museum of palaeontology (“and I make no bones about it”) he proceeds to characterise himself as a “dinosaur”, a leftover and a “specimen… of undoubted interest” as well as a teddy bear who wants a hug. I haven’t heard the Grinderman album that many times, but from what I have encountered it sounds like this song is a more existentially involved rendering of the same cross generational longing of Cave and co’s ‘No Pussy Blues’.  

He veers from pathetic whisperings to the mock confidence of the crooned refrain “I wanna be your lover” to the defensive honesty in his pleas of self-awareness. It’s uncomfortable, but I am looking forward to hearing the song live. You may well be too; he is performing at quite a few of the summer festivals. His vocals are often rather buried in the raucous bar room rock of the highly skilled band, bar a few prominent examples in ‘I Never Said I Was Deep’ and ‘Fuckingsong’. This has as much to do with the obviously crushed mental state of Cocker as it has to do with Steve Albini being at the controls.  

The overdriven snarl of ‘Homewrecker’ sounds like another song influenced by Grinderman, and why not, it’s a template that many people in their forties clearly find a lot of inspiration in. Jarvis is rendering domesticity as trench warfare, duplicity as only natural and confusion as an inevitability. Like a man delivering the shipping forecast for Monogamy (just west of Biscay) live from the scene of a force 10 gale. The only life raft just happens to contain a few potentially horny mermaids… and he has to avoid hypothermia somehow… right?  

It’s testament to this man’s songwriting ability that he has managed to put these things to paper and tape. It sounds like the band are trying to keep him going through the rough patch and he feeds on it. You get the impression that he is only just about treading water, but he is treading it and that is a hell of an album to make. For every breakdown, there is a spark from the future poking through the soaked blankets that provide no warmth but are too much of an effort to throw off.  

Take for instance the moment in the sweet fragility of ‘Hold Still’ where the sweetness evaporates with a few harp strums, leaving behind the very raw, very naked pain of “a single parent at the fair”. Once that’s out of the way with a resilient surge from the band, Cocker intones “You’re cosmic dust, but you’re everything to me” over the dreamy outro in perhaps his strongest moment on the record. He follows it up with the throwaway bravado stomp of ‘Fuckingsong’ which may be funny under all that jerky snarl and the cheeky guitar feedback, I just haven’t got much interest in following the hook of the final line “it’s just a fucking song” back up the line to the fisherman.  

‘Caucasian Blues’ starts out with a jangly west-coast psych riff and a chirpy flute. It could be the intro to a Circulus song (a fine English band if ever there was one!) but it soon settles into some more grind, which is enjoyable if not completely up to the promise made by the intro. The overdriven shouting halfway through the song, like so many moments on this album, will likely make for a vivid and engrossing peak of his live performances. I say go see him play before you buy a copy of this, as it will likely be informed and infused by seeing the man invoke all this neurotic shit on stage.  

He closes it out with ‘Slush’ and ‘You’re In My Eyes (Discosong)’, a vision of the end of the world sharing a room with a vision of another unbearable separation. Not that he doesn’t make an analogy or five between the two in ‘Slush’ itself: “If I could, I would refrigerate this moment”. He even re-imagines The Melt as some kind of global/romantic catharsis. He might be right, but one leads to life and the other leads to death, an imperative difference that Jarvis is acutely aware of. 

At least I think he is, when I can make out what he’s saying. For all I know the whole Climate thing might be a ruse. The shoegaze/discobeat sonics of the final pair are very enveloping and the narratives of both are longer and more demanding than what preceded it, jarring with the attention span set up by an end to end listen. Further Complications might be an awkward and shifty presence at the party, but those are the people I generally feel able to talk to because they know what Real Fun looks like. Here’s to Jarvis Cocker making more records, and kicking out a few more Teddysaurus babies. And good on him for ending it with an ode to the precious nature of love and life and the worth of it all to boot.