Further Complications is Jarvis Cocker's second solo record on Rough Trade and is produced by Steve Albini after the pair met at Pitchfork music festival in 2008. Albini's touch is noticeable on some of the rockier numbers and has delivered some brilliant fuzz and driving beats.
Jarvis himself has given a performance to make us all proud, running the vocal gamut from roaring garage rock, to sleazy funk all spiced with his trademark story telling theatrics. The result is something quite kaleidoscopic in terms of mood, tempo and themes, featuring some of Jarvis' most sentimental, joyful and exhilarating music to date.
Review
Perhaps it was inevitable that Jarvis Cocker would find no peace in
domesticity. It may have treated him well for a brief period, resulting in the
quite brilliant mature pop of his 2006 solo debut, but no other pop star has
been as singularly sex-obsessed as Jarvis, so it was just a matter of time
before his attentions wandered elsewhere…and so they have on his wildly
depraved second album, Further Complications. Right from the start with the
thumping “Angela,” Jarvis has flesh on the mind, just as he did during the
days of His ‘n’ Hers with its songs about sisters, virginity, and fetishes,
but where those songs were underscored by the vague melancholy of somebody who
has only glimpsed his fantasy and frets that he will never see it again, the
songs here pulsate with perversion, a middle-aged man making damn sure that
he's going to get with a tight 23-year-old body yet again; it's the sound of a
fetishist turned sexual omnivore. Fittingly, the sound of the record is
completely changed, with only the closing “You're in My Eyes (Discosong)”
echoing back to the louche, languid urban fantasies of “Deep Fried in
Kelvin.” The rest is all gnarled, ugly hard rock, dredging up ghosts of the
Stooges and the Spiders from Mars, dressing them in stylish second-hand clothes
that are razored to ribbons by Steve Albini's typically unflinching production.
Under his cold glare, all the madness of Further Complications is pushed right
to the surface – all the stuttering, slashing guitars, Steve
Mackey's wailing sax, Jarvis' obsessive, compulsive carnality. If he has any
regrets leaving the settled bohemian pop professor of Jarvis behind, it only
surfaces on “Slush,” a dirgelike meditation on global warming overshadowed
by the hedonistic riot of Further Complications at large, a record that does its
best to live up to Cocker's “never said I was deep, but I am profoundly
shallow” proclamation. He's denied his id for too long, so the dam bursts
here and it's impossible not to happily wallow in the flood of filth unleashed
by Further Complications. Stephen Thomas Erlewine – AllMusic