Pulp: We Love Life

The last time anyone heard from Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, he'd turned claustrophobic, choking on the bad air, stale perfume, and dashed expectations of 1997's This Is Hardcore. The only option left seemed to be to head for the country, or what's left of it. On the long-in-the-making and longer-delayed We Love Life, Cocker and Pulp find the countryside they might be expected to find, one in which vines grow out of gas tanks, rivers take the runoff from disused candy factories, and everyone who doesn't die at the hands of a wandering lunatic winds up brokenhearted and decides to carry on anyway. As a lyricist, Cocker never found a metaphor he couldn't expand to the length of a song, and Life begins with him expanding one to fill two. "Weeds" and "Weeds II (The Origin Of The Species)" connects its central image to the class consciousness of Different Class, using its wild vegetation to stand in for the immigrants and working-class people alternately disdained, exploited, enjoyed, ignored, and discarded by polite society. "The story has always been the same," Cocker recites on the half-spoken "Weeds II," "a source of wonder due to their ability to thrive on poor-quality soil offering very little nourishment." As usual, it's almost too heady a conceit for a mere pop song, yet Pulp makes it work. But here, nature takes on forms other than weeds. In "Wickerman," the album's sprawling centerpiece, Cocker follows a river from behind a motorway through a city and on to points unknown, passing industrial waste, furtive couples, and ghosts from the past. This has nothing and everything to do with the cult horror film of the same name, in which the rhythms of nature assert themselves against the best efforts of civilization. With Cocker's childhood hero Scott Walker serving as producer, the band strikes the proper balance between ambition and pop instinct. Songs like "The Trees" and "Bad Cover Version" help balance the recitations with catchy moments, an ingredient the nonetheless expert Hardcore tended to forget. The title doesn't quite exorcise the glumness of its predecessor, but there's less irony to it than might be expected. "I love my life," Cocker sings on "I (Heart) Life." "It's the only reason I'm alive." That sort of paradox suggests that the country air has done him some good.