What a way to end your last album. Pulp is unlikely to pull another album from the depths of the recording studio – and if they do, they have made a fool of Cult Following. But if We Love Life is their final outing, Sunrise will remain their finest closer. Yes, better than Bar Italia. Certainly stronger than The Day After the Revolution and leagues ahead of whatever ended His ‘n’ Hers. Pulp found themselves obsessed with nature and the clarity being in the great outdoors brought. Sunrise is best experienced while walking along some pier in the East Riding, hoping you can fix your mangled eyesight by staring into shining pockets of clouds. This is what happens when we grow accustomed to screens, but Sunrise is of a different walk of life.
Such is the beauty of this Scott Walker-produced piece. Jarvis Cocker wrote wonders for the outdoors with We Love Life but Sunrise is the only one to analyse how being in the depths can make you feel. It is a song of familial intensity as was The Birds in Your Garden. But the rebirth heard as he pulls himself out of the underground and into the warm light can be seen as a reaction to This is Hardcore. Pulp formed essential and intense swerves in musical direction across their final three albums. From the dance joys of Different Class to the bubble-bursting This is Hardcore, their final work pronounces a calmness. They are content. Sunrise figures this too and with one of the finest guitar solos the band ever brought in, they close their initial time together on one of their best works. A layer of instrumental bliss which Cocker has since danced and dived around the stage too, flailing his arms like a broken pinwheel. It is wonderful to see.
And it marks a wonderful listen too, particularly when Sunrise is coupled with the afterthoughts of its B-Sides. A dying art at this point as CDs never had the same appeal as 7” records for those hidden gems and extra tracks, but here they are, nonetheless. They paired it with The Trees, an obvious choice given the titles but tonally quite different. Sunrise should have been a lead. We can cry out against its butchered release as much as we like, it does not change what happened twenty-odd years ago. It would have made sense but not a lot did for the band at the time. All they knew about their direction was it was time to park up, take in the breeze and write up thoughts on the outside world.
When their life is consistently on the road and in those seedy rooms and experiences which inspired the excess masterclass, This is Hardcore, a turn in another direction, like what happened after Different Class, was an inspired and necessary choice. To do more of the same as Russell Senior had called for after their 1995 classic would have been futile. They evolve once more and with it comes the danger and frustration a three-minute instrumental powerhouse can provide. Sunrise is an opportunity to hint at a new day dawning. It would take twelve years for the sun to come up and the band to reform, but how welcome it was to see.
