PULP

Judging from the tone of the songs on DIFFERENT CLASS, Jarvis Cocker, Pulp's lead singer, chief lyricist and main attraction, seems like a spiteful little bastard playing Robin Hood--or, maybe, Robin Hood playing the spiteful little bastard. His suave thespian delivery of songs about English class warfare and an outsiders' existence, suggests a class-conscious Bryan Ferry. And he fronts a band as majestic, glammy and multi-faceted as the Eno-era Roxy Music playing a form of modern-day Rocky Horror Britpop. Pulp's is a thoroughly British pose--the themes, colloquialisms and topics of DIFFERENT CLASS have little to do with American culture. Like E.M. Forster novels, however, the best songs play with emotions of societal existence, which translate easily across the ocean. "Mis-Shapes," an acoustic-guitar-fueled call-to-arms for the working class young, and "Common People," the tale of a young upper-class female who goes slumming for a commoner lover ("I wanna sleep with common people") and finds a venomous Cocker, are alone worth the price of admission. And judging by his coldly detached description of a rave in "Sorted Out For E's & Wizz," Cocker finds no solace in the counterculture either, which suggests that the different classes he's talking about aren't simply shaped by the contents of pocketbooks but the contents of hearts and minds.

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.