The press release for Jarvis Cocker’s impressive new album, Further Complications, is pretty creative so I thought I’d share it.

NOTES ON THIS ALBUM
By Jarvis Cocker

Please allow me to anticipate some of the questions you might have:

1 – WHY CHICAGO? WHY STEVE ALBINI?

Last year we were invited to play at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago during July. Steve Mackey (he plays the bass, you know) suggested that we try recording some songs with Steve Albini whilst we were in town. This made sense on many levels – to go all that way just to play one show seemed a bit wasteful (eco-awareness) Plus, I had already decided that I wanted this record to be more of a group effort than the last one. So we had worked songs out in rehearsal rather than me delivering them fully-written & now I wanted to record them in an environment where we could all play at the same time & hopefully capture something of the spirit of a band all working together, all aiming in the same direction ( though at what I really couldn’t say). Electrical Audio (Albini’s studio) is specifically designed to record bands in that way.

Plus, it was very cheap.

(The two songs we tried out in July worked out, so we booked time in January to finish the album. The pound collapsed against the dollar in the interim).

2 – WHO DOES WHAT?
The core band is:
Jarvis sings & plays various bits & pieces.
Steve Mackey plays the bass
Ross Orton plays the drums
Simon Stafford plays keyboards & sings backing vocals
Tim McCall plays the guitar in the right-hand speaker
Martin Craft plays the guitar in the left-hand speaker + occasional keyboards & backing vocals

3 – HAS JARVIS GONE ROCK?
No – but during the course of touring his last record he discovered that , with this band, he COULD rock & so he’d be a fool not to. (When the situation demanded it).

4 – WHAT ABOUT THE SONGS ON THE ALBUM?

I’ll tell you a bit about some of the other songs we recorded. SLUSH is a song I wrote whilst aboard a ship that was sailing up the west coast of Greenland last year. I guess that slush will be the ultimate outcome of glob al warming. CAUCASIAN BLUES is an attempt to understand the pain of a man whose Honda Goldwing has run out of petrol. I NEVER SAID I WAS DEEP is the phrase that I would like carved on my tombstone & HOMEWRECKER! is an absolute racket featuring saxophone from Steve Mackay (he played on The Stooges’ “Funhouse”, you know).

& FINALLY – WHAT’S WITH THE BEARD?

I grew it to keep my face warm in the Arctic & then I kind of got attached to it. (The amount of grey in it horrified me at first but now I think it acts as a handy reminder of my own mortality.)

Thank you for taking the time to read these notes.

Further complications await.

-Jarvis Cocker

Download the first single from the album (“Angela”) here.