More is an album of decisions, where the paths keep forking, and consequences compound. “Though we’ve never spoken or exchanged emails,” goes “Tina,” a paean to a woman our narrator’s never met, “Yes, tonight I’m thinking about scenes from a marriage that never took place.” What happens to life’s flow chart when we foreclose a possibility? What happens when—as in “Farmer’s Market,” a capacious orchestral ballad about an encounter with an attractive woman in a parking lot—acting on impulse pays off? What would’ve happened if we didn’t go back and get her number? Isn’t it time, as the breathy crescendo asks, “We started living?”
In songs that sound like Eurodisco, chanson, theatre-sized string arrangement, and a little bit of Kurt Weill, More’s pursuit is the business of living, and the stakes involved therein. Memories of things done and not done catch us erratically—padding about the kitchen, the bedroom—and make the mind reel. The buzz of a fridge, in “Background Noise,” summons the sound of love’s long-gone hum, and rockets us into an elegy not far off from the species of heartache summoned in “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” ”My Sex”— which I can sketch out loosely as what would happen if Leonard Cohen asked Martin Amis to write him a song—has his glans become a metonym for his art writ large. “My sex is out of its mind,” he mutters. “My sex is running out of time.”
Cocker’s called More “age-apropriate,” which spans not only the poetry inside it, but the noises it makes. We’re not dealing with the deliciously cheap and chintzy synths that made those early ’90s albums so ridiculously spangly. More goes big and mature with lusher, sometimes even baroque arrangements to surround Cocker’s voice—a voice that’s huskier, more leaden by time and gravity. The huge quantity of violins on “Hymn of the North” (with members of the Eno family singing backup) makes him sound as rich and blue as the late Scott Walker, a lodestar and former producer. And though the album still has grounding in big fat basslines and BPMs that occasionally flirt with disco, the distinct chug of longtime bassist Steve Mackey—who died in 2023, and to whose memory this album is dedicated—is missing all over. Recording without Mackey “was weird at first,” Cocker says. “It was not the nicest thing.”
But Pulp remains resolutely Pulpy, and the ingredients and pillars that are absent are outpaced by what still is. Cocker yawps as he used to on the other side of the millennium, still invokes a very specific type of woman’s name (like Paula, Sylvia, Deborah, and now Tina), and the tracks are peopled by sprawling family trees of imagined mothers, aunts, vicars, sisters, brothers, fathers. “Like two little children under the covers,” goes “Grown Ups,” the album’s crux, “I’ll be dad, and you’ll be the mom.” Like a mid-life callback to 1993’s “Babies,” where the fumbly narrator watches his friend’s sister have sex through a closet door, it’s a track where we witness our narrator caught in the throes of a watershed. What’s watersheddy about “Grown-Ups,” though, isn’t the spectacle of another sex act, but the slower, more mundane epiphany that adulthood is inherently part of coming-of-age. Children pretend to be mature just as foolishly as adults do, but the pile-up of quotidian acts of idiocy are exactly what builds a life. “We’ll make out we know what it is,” he says, “but we don’t.” ‘Coming-of-age’ might usually be seen as a transitional period we’ve long since passed but here, Cocker seems to sandwich our palms, look into our eyes, and shake his head no—it’s one of those lifelong processes. To paraphrase the chorus, being grown-up has no discrete age or eon; it’s an art, or an act.
