Pulp went through many manifestations during their twenty years together and this sampler showcases some of their best music just before they hit the big-time with 1995's "Common People". The recordings were released on the Gift label and were repackaged by Island when Pulp signed to a big label for the first time in 1993. There is very little overlap here with His'N'Hers, their first proper album for Island: only the splendid "Babies" made a reappearance later on, unfortunately condemning the intense "Razzmatazz" to relative obscurity when by rights it belongs on His'N'Hers alongside Babies and "Lipgloss", which it resembles in tone and style. The first tracks, "Space", "O.U." and "Styloroc" are raw and full of leftfield synthesiser noodlings. "Space" is a deep and poignant rambling about stargazing, leaving one's body for a moment to swim amongst the stars, and coming back down to Earth refreshed and able to face the world as it is, not as it should be. O.U. refers more to the style of the music (based on Open University theme tunes) than to the lyrics, which are the quintessential Pulp ennui and the breakdown - hesitant at first - of a relationship, which Pulp have always been better at writing than more conventional love songs. The second "side" (I had it on tape fifteen years ago, and that is how I still envisage it, despite now having the CD) begins with the magnum opus "Sheffield, Sex City", where Jarvis mentally walks us round his home time, and then comes the trilogy of "Stacks", "Inside Susan", and "59 Lyndhurst Grove", following a teenager from the first flush of puberty to bored housewifery in the suffocating suburbs enticed from her slumber to the bohemian lifestyle she left behind in the second song. The album is more than the sum of its parts, given that Pulp knew how to stitch their works together and present them as albums well before they hit the limelight in 1995. I always preferred this stage in general - when they were good but before they went interstellar - and coming back to it ten years since I last heard it, it is one of the albums that has worn well and still remains as fresh and exciting as the day it was made.Read full review
i like a song on this album called razzmatazz and i don't want to take collections, so i found the original cd album on ebay!
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