Different Class

by

Pulp

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This album has everything you could want. A million listenings would not be enough to get all the humor and dirt and sex that is in "A Different Class." This makes you want to put on spangled shoes and be a rock star -- it is a huge, riotous, spooky, ambient, moody, loud CD. It has the size of great glam-era Bowie but the maudlin smarts of the Smiths. Highly recommended for dancing on tables, drinking vodka, and finding a too-young-for-you boyfriend. Also suitable for driving a convertible over flat, bare highways at night in a cowboy hat and sequined hot pants.

(I think this album defies adjectives, so I am trying to capture the big-ness of this fab album.)

I really liked the liner comment - "please do not read the lyrics while listening to the recordings" - when I first read it: it suggested an intelligent and sympathetic band at work. Jarvis Cocker writes well, with a special knack for making simple lyrics seem to be about quite complex ideas...his mixture of speech and singing increases the effect. And Pulp manage to come up fairly consistently with catchy tunes on this album - so all would appear good on the surface.

But Different Class does not work for me - I had not listened to it for quite a while (I've got it on now), and all I could remember was that I thought it a fairly weak album, without remembering why. It's because I find no urge to listen to the whole thing - it's not even that the songs are all the same, though it is partly Cocker's outlandishness that makes him tedious only a few songs into the album. He can't sing straight, and I find that annoying, even while others undoubtedly and understandably love that. I think it's great to have these properly anti-establishment pop stars...but too many frills and not enough substance undermines the music for me.

However, their frontman is not the band entire, and there are some quite talented musicians with an ear for simple melodies but complex backgrounds and rhythms. But while SOME of the music is brilliant, such as in Common People and Disco 2000, other tracks are pretty insubstantial, stuff I wouldn't keep the radio on for, let alone put an album on to listen to. Some of the catchiest tunes become very dull about a minute in. I am tempted to agree with one of the other reviewers that Common People alone is worth parting with your money for...but honestly, I cannot recommend an album that has only a few songs worth listening to on it.

And as for the liner comment - I have lost my initial respect for it, because personally it just seems to be another way to create the band's "We just want the right to be different" image, written because it ain't nowhere else (well, I have never seen it printed in any other album liners), and so there. I mean, there may be an argument for not looking at the lyrics while a song is playing, but that would be that you can't enjoy it as much - surely people can work that out for themselves?

This album is not for everyone, but it is definitely for some (common or otherwise) people. I strongly recommend listening to most of the album before buying it, if you can - otherwise, play all the samples three times each, and see if you can bear it.