Pulp's "different class" is a brilliant, eccentric, irresistible pop album about fucking and fucking up. And you might not like it – at first. The record is rife with sexual combat and bitter recrimination. It rattles along with the addictive locomotion of low-rent '70s glam pop and cheesy Eurodisco, like classic Roxy Music with a case of Boney M. And Jarvis Cocker – the gangly frontman, melodramatic vocalist and articulate, argumentative lyric brain of this arch-British pop band – can get under your skin like a case of hives.

As a singer and writer, Cocker specializes in hapless pining and geeky self-obsession, desperately holding on to a childhood crush in "Disco 2000." Even when Cocker lucks out with true love, he refuses to accept his good fortune, no questions asked. "Where would I be now if we'd never met?" he sings in a nervous yelp over a delightfully cheesy loser's-lounge blend of strings and low, throaty guitar twang in "Something Changed." "Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?"

But Cocker, who has been leading different lineups of Pulp since 1981, is anything but an irritating milksop. As far as he's concerned, sex and love are a lot like the British class war – eternal rituals of jealousy, repression and snobbery. On Different Class, the band's breakthrough album in the U.K., Cocker comes out swinging, taking on the haves and the have-nots alike with a combination of tart social observation and bittersweet retro-pop grandeur.

In the sly, lethal "Common People," Cocker skewers a patronizing society child flirting with the fish 'n' chips life against a synth-pop backdrop that suggests Phil Spector hijacking Duran Duran's "Rio." "Mis-Shapes" is a blast of plastic, fantastic vengeance against the plebes, sort of the Pet Shop Boys meet the Clash's "White Riot." In the jaunty, Bowie-esque "Sorted for E's and Wizz," Cocker reviews the fleeting ecstasies of youth culture – the all-night raves, the drugs, the indie festivals awash in mud – with a more compassionate eye: "In the middle of the night/It feels all right, but then tomorrow morning/Oh, then you come down." The way Cocker whispers the word down is so soft and sad, you can almost feel the hurt and morning-after emptiness.

Cocker is definitely a ham; on "Live Bed Show," he sounds like Julian Cope doing Jacques Brel. But Cocker's a smart and sassy one, a romantic complainer with an infallible bullshit detector – like Elvis Costello swanning around in Bryan Ferry's tuxedo. And as a band, the other underacclaimed members of Pulp (guitarist and violinist Russell Senior, keyboard player Candida Doyle, bassist Steve Mackey, drummer Nick Banks, and guitarist and keyboardist Mark Webber) elevate the breathy agitation and strangled but stubborn hope in Cocker's voice with kitschy succulence.

Even in a truly classless society, sex separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the romantics from the mere runters. Different Class is the sound of Jarvis Cocker keeping score – with delicious accuracy. (RS 731)

DAVID FRICKE