Pulp: More (digital outlets)

Sometimes you can feel you are living in a previous time.

It happened a couple of years back when the Beatles' new single Now and Then was released and Bob Dylan was back with the Shadow Kingdom album. That same year, 2023, Iggy Pop, Uriah Heep, Genesis, the Zombies, Jethro Tull and others whose time seemed long ago also had albums out.

And of course so did Willie Nelson and Neil Young (a live album and four or five from his Archive series).

Talk about Journey Through the Past, huh Neil?

We didn't have to look for the past, it was arriving almost daily.

And again.

Recently the British “dad-rock” magazine Mojo's reviewed new albums by Sparks (debut album 1971), Doobie Brothers (1971), Van Morrison (first solo album 1967) and, inevitably, yet another Neil Young.

The Sparks and Van albums were rather good, the Neil Young very much a lesser entry in his absurdly long catalogue.

In this context Pulp – formed in the late 1970s, breaking through in the 1990's Britpop era with their Different Class album and hit single Common People – seem like upstarts.

Their rise was slow, the end quick. Just two more studio albums.

But it seems Pulp were simply on an extended sabbatical because More, their first studio album in 24 years, finds some of the old gang (and others from Cocker's Jarv Is band) back together with songwriter Jarvis Cocker singing “I was born to perform, it's a calling. I exist to do this” on the anthemic Spike Island, a nod to where Stone Roses played their 1990 game-changing show and birthed Britpop and Oasis.

There's an infectious, spirited yearning on the disco-driven Got to Have Love, the uplifting and melodramatic Tina (with Cocker's customary observational detail of “matching socks”) and the moving spoken ballad Farmers Market about a chance encounter with an old flame: “We thought we were just joking, trying dreams on for size. We never thought we'd be stuck with them for the rest of our natural lives”

Cocker -- now 61 and looking even more the associate professor -- always seemed the adult in the room (although only four years older than Noel Gallagher and Blur's Damon Albarn) so is perfectly placed to sing Grown Ups about the difficulties of adulthood: making responsible decisions, moving to a better neighbourhood and raging to escape it all.

With subtle and quirky funk (Slow Jam), the sound of Peter Gabriel going sleazy (My Sex) and Cocker's heartfelt emotions (Hymn of the North) alongside more lacerating observations (A Sunset) Pulp are back and on top form, resurrecting the 1990s.

More delivers on the promise of its title.

And as the Carpenters – remember them? – sang on their album called Now & Then oddly enough, “It's yesterday once more”.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here