Jarvis Cocker’s new album will be produced by celebrated crank Steve Albini.
The unlikely partnership blossomed while Cocker was in Chicago last July for the Pitchfork Music Festival. The former Pulp man, band in tow, called in at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio to run through a few new numbers.
Apparently Cocker was so impressed by the sound and the price (“very cheap”) that the gang reconvened in January to record new full-length Futher Complications.
It’ll be out through Rough Trade on May 18th and features many of the songs previewed during Cocker’s recent live dates – the likes of ‘Angela’, ‘I Never Said I Was Deep’ and ‘Caucasian Blues’.
While those jams and the majority of Cocker’s new material sounded like the loveable rantings of a hacked off uncle, The Quietus wonders if the Albini hook-up isn’t a step too far the way of belligerence, images springing to mind of a sitcom following the antics of a bachelor pair farting in solitude and confused by technology.
That Jarvis has entrusted his latest progeny to a man responsible for both The Weirdness and Excellent Italian Greyhound in recent years is a point worth considering, while Albini’s form with UK acts is similarly erratic, weaving from Electrelane to Beachbuggy and on to Miles Hunt’s short-lived post-Wonder Stuff project Vent 414.
Will Steve Albini ruin Jarvis Cocker? Does he understand British music? Answers will come in mid-May, when the Manic Street Preachers’ Albini-produced album Journal For Plague Lovers is also set to arrive.
