Pulp: His 'n' Hers (album)

It happens halfway through 'Acrylic Afternoon': as Jarvis Cocker pants and pig-squeals through this saga of suburban snoggery and the violin squiggles in the corner, you suddenly realise that what should be an hysterical farce à la 'Ooops Vicar. Where's My Trousers' is actually a discomforting, rather nasty piece of work. And you're not quite sure whether or not you like this Cocker bloke. Halfway through 'Have You Seen Her Lately', amid the howls of, "No, don't go round to see him tonight / He's made such a mess of your life," you're not quite sure if you like yourself.

Such is the sordidness of Pulp's Woolworthless world. After a full decade of posturing nonchalantly on the peripheries of public acceptance, it's hardly surprising that Sheffield's most diligent ambassadors of tank tops and bottom drawer confessions should have carved out such a twisted niche for themselves.

However, the fact that 'His 'N' Hers' should flirt with the kind of commercial nous more applicable to, say, flogging ice-cold Evian in the middle of the Sahara, is either a) a testament to Pulp's ability to nail down the human psyche, or b) simple proof that we're a nation of perverts. With a nice side, of course.

Because while Jarvis may groan on about teatime sex and sleazy adolescent experiences, he still comes across like Jilted John Travolta, the geek in the bad dancing shoes who couldn't actually harm you even if you demanded the social comforts of a binliner, a yard of flex and a bowl of fruit.

Which is why 'Happy Endings' is quite excellent, a sweeping ballroom extravaganza with lovely '70s disco gurgles and genuine Eurovision class, sealed by Cocker's admirable inability to hit all the correct high notes. Which is why 'Have You Seen...' is even better, a tripped-out melange of melodies and emotion which -like all great pop songs - dares to aim for vertiginous heights normal bands barely envisage. And which is why 'Lipgloss' and, in particular, 'Babies' retain a sense of head-spinning grandeur after countless plays.

For an over-decade sensation, Pulp sound implausibly fresh and indecently frenzied. The fact that the wildly indulgent paean to holidays of the past, 'David's Last Summer', brings to mind nothing less glorious than Bobby Goldsboro's seminal 'Summer (The First Time)' proves that Pulp have both an acute eye for seemingly banal detail and a grasp on timeless songcrafting.

Not all our lives are like Readers' Wives: that's why Ride didn't think of making a film about personalities losing their virginity. But 'His 'N' Hers mixes the venom of the voyeur with the flamboyance of the flirt so naturally that one can only writhe around the shag-pile wondering when on earth the record's main protagonist is going to be awarded his own Viz cartoon strip. 'Jarvis Cocker, The Sleazy Rocker'? Yip!

Who was that Brett geezer, anyway? (8)

A bizarre hybrid of Mark E. Smith, Alan Bennett and the oilier aspects of the Bonzos' Vivian Stanshall, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker is what used to be called "a bit of a one". Cocker has spent the past 10 years struggling on the indie circuit while perfecting his white trash love stories. Pulp share the same glam nostalgia as The World Of Twist and pick up where the Roxy Music of In Every Dream Home A Heartache left off, layering distorted guitars against the extraordinarily antiquated cheap synth sounds of Candida Doyle in a pop stew that is as archly self-aware as the fevered narratives. Cocker does sound disconcertingly like Suede's Brett Anderson but he is less of a self-dramatist and more a sly, foppish observer of life behind soiled lace curtains. His lovers are obsessive, overheated creatures, while romantic idylls like Acrylic Afternoons or the closing, half-spoken epic, David's Last Summer, are delightful precisely because they're doomed. ✰✰✰✰

Lou Reed's New York. Young Morrissey's Manchester. And now, to the globe-trotting rock fan's itinerary of cities-as-living-metaphors, we must add Jarvis Cocker's Sheffield. Let's face it, Def Leppard were never going to put the city in the charts, were they?

Anyone who's paid the slightest attention to Pulp's brilliant pupation from Indie curios to five-star leading-edge charity-shop deities will have noticed this obsession already. From 'Sheffield Sex City' (Candida Doyle's voyeuristic commentary on the town succumbing to hormonal craziness) to 'Deep Fried In Kelvin'' (Pulp's own 'Jerusalem' with Jarvis as the William Blake of the concrete estate), over the past two years of singles they've carved out their own landscape of endless suburban ambiguity. In Pulp's Steel City every net curtain could hide either an innocent teenage cider-drinking afternoon, or a sado-masochist housewife at the end of her pink frilly tether, and you're never quite sure which one Jarvis prefers. Probably both.

They've skilfully turned Sheffield into a soft-focus British Everytown that David Lynch would recognise if he'd had a decent comprehensive education, and it's not a million miles from the nameless Newtown dead-zone portrayed on Blur's 'Modern Life Is Rubbish'. But where Damon Albarn's version is a nightmare community of blank faces, Jarvis takes us into the kitchens and parlours and bedrooms to show us...what? To show us a city going mad with frustration, ennui and stoppered-up lust.

And – selfless character that he is – he does it all in the first person, turning the long awaited Proper Pulp Album into a kind of Robin Askwith Confessions Of A Crimplenist routine. In 'Acrylic Afternoon' ('Acrylic Afternoon'!) he's a desperate seducer pleading, panting and finally screaming over tea and Chocolate Hob-Nobs, while the seductee's kids play in the street outside. Amid the thumping daytime radio disco of 'She's A Lady', he's trying to reconcile lost love with his uncontrollable free-range cupidity, with the result that he starts seeing sex everywhere. "Where have you gone?" he howls. "The moon...the moon has gone down on the sun!" and this nifty juggling of comic moments with real pain keep 'His 'N' Hers' alive with surprises.

Vocal-wise, Jarvis isn't exactly the Mariah Carey of Eccleshall, but his battery of breathy inflections make the whole record sound like it's on heat. Whatever else, you can sure tell why the French like Pulp.

Of course, the band have their rock, pathos and passion conceived on a grand scale, but executed on a car-boot sale's worth of Stylophones, VL-Tones and digital kazoos, so that the arrangement somehow amplifies the tragedy of it all. It's a routine, yes, but it's theirs and if anyone's got a right to use it, they have. The record's prime example is 'Happy Endings', a miracle of a ballroom ballad which refurbishes the killer melodramatics of Abba's 'The Winner Takes It All' with added glitter, dry ice and revolving mirror-balls. But where the Abba song looks back on a dead affair, 'Happy Endings' is all unfulfilled hopes and wasted dreams, transported into a fantasy landscape dominated by Russell Senior's woozy violin.

After all this it's hard to see how the pat 'kitsch' label fits them any more. It would if they didn't mean it all, if the surfeit of man-made fibres in the songs didn't make them so alive with static magnetism that they'd pull paint off a passing car, and if Cocker didn't have such a laser-sighted eye for the tiny details that make these songs throb with life.

Dust floating through the window, cheap cider cooling in the canal, virginities not so much lost as mislaid...ring any bells? What is it with all these records? 'His 'N' Hers', 'Modern Life...' (and for that matter Blur's excellent upcoming 'Park Life'), 'Stay Together', 'Your Arsenal', 'Tiger Bay', even Elvis Costello's 'Brutal Youth' ...every half-accurate record about Britain in the 1990s has also been shot through with heart-crushing little scenes of broken people and spent hopes. Why? What is going on? Are we really like that? Pulp say, Yes you are, but 'His 'N' Hers' might help you cope a bit. 4/5