Jarvis : Jarvis Cocker : Review : Rolling Stone

Of all the boho songwriters who hit it semi-big in the Nineties boom years, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker was the one with the biggest heart, the bitchiest lips and the swooniest tunes, which is why his flamboyant thrift-store Casanova legend burns on while his peers gather dust. On his first solo album, Jarvis, he shakes off his early-century doldrums with his finest batch of songs since This Is Hardcore. The songs are languid Eurotrash ballads, strung out on New Wave highs while hitting a post-punk low; his voice is a sultry whisper of bemused (yet unironic) adult lust.

The big problem with Jarvis is that it doesn't include the songs he wrote for the soundtrack of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and sang in the movie with the Hogwarts prom band, the Weird Sisters (including Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood). "Do the Hippogriff" and "Magic Works" would have been standouts. Oh, well -- you'd be hard-pressed to find any song here that loses steam after forty or fifty listens. With old Pulp friends pitching in, Cocker goes for big, swooping ballads in the style of "Quantum Theory," "Black Magic" and "Baby's Coming Back to Me." He croons about loneliness with all his usual compassionate warmth, whether it's the teen-girl angst of "Big Julie" or the midlife malaise of "I Will Kill Again": "Log on in the nighttime/Drink a half-bottle of wine/Buy a couple of records/Look at naked girls from time to time." Best of all, "Tonite" is a Serge Gainsbourg-style anthem, where Cocker abandons any kind of joker pose to plead, "The night belongs to lovers/So show some respect." Respect granted!