Today's popological teaser is to explain the strange case of Pulp, a band who have for ten years stuck resolutely to their task of being Pulp, waiting with saintly reserves of patience for the rest of the world to cotton on to what they're doing. And now that the world finally has, Pulp offer a major label debut which in many ways is a cartoon version of themselves.

Were 'Lipgloss' a stick of rock - and anything seems possible in Pulpland - we could see the words "kitchen sink" etched through the middle. Lumme! With a surfeit of loop-da-loopy keyboard loopiness from Candida Doyle and lashings of positively barking boy guitar spangle from the good Russell atop an urgent shuffle beat, this sounds not so far from the Pulp variant as bowdlerised by bacofoil-sponsored Mancunians World Of Twist back in the "good", "old" days of 1990. Thanks to Jarvis' idiosyncratic line in melodrama, though, matters land on the right side of self-parody and 'Lipgloss' emerges unscathed, a ravishsome beast.

The subtext to all this is that Pulp are about to 'make it' in a fairly colossal way, which would be nice if that's what they want: to this end, the ten-minute epic 'Deep Friend In Kelvin' plus the more familiarly downbeat 'You're A Nightmare' serve as a crash course for those who couldn't be bothered tuning in before now. And are they gonna sue the Tindersticks or what?