Jarvis Cocker

Former frontman of the former British sense-band Pulp, Jarvis Cocker has been creating sexual narratives both desperate and weary since he was a teenager. It's been 25 years of rock and pop equally shameless (always ready for the next bit of fun) and forlorn (when you think about it, this isn't really that much fun), culminating in This Is Hardcore, a come-on muttered from a broken-down man, behind a wall of sound and fractured sweetness. But now, even the bravado of despair has gone missing; this is a flat, tepid album. The production's barely present, the sentiment itself, ghosted in. It's also the best thing Jarvis has done in years.

The easy swing of songs like "Tonite" makes settling for less seem an actual consolation ("So let's go take some drugs / And let's go have some sex"), and in the utter lack of hope there's a surprising amount of warmth, the relief of knowing that this is, finally, it. No more trying. This despair is finally an adult despair, the sort that's almost crooned. Still, this isn't an intimate record; it's a dilapidated one. "I Will Kill Again" is our standard, logging onto the Internet, drinking a half-bottle of wine. This is the sound of someone putting their life into boxes.

Nothing can forgive the insipid or the faithless, but there's more than enough shambling loss here to keep one listening, if only to find out exactly how missing one can go. By the time we get to the album's big number ("Big Julie"), we know how this world goes: None of us were saved by rock and roll. That doesn't mean it wasn't beautiful.