Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales - Room 29

The Guardian 80

(Deutsche Grammophon)
The ex-Pulp frontman and pianist check in at Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont for this beautifully bittersweet song cycle

Hearing Jarvis Cocker’s lascivious Sheffield mutter can still produce a contact high, particularly in those who came of age with Pulp. Within a few seconds of the title track of this 16-episode song cycle, we find Cocker settling into LA’s showbizzy Chateau Marmont and contemplating the room’s piano – the glamorous assignations it has witnessed, their bittersweet flipsides.

If you half-remember Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, this is familiar territory for Cocker – actors doing drugs on the baby grand, shaking their money-makers, while other gilded lives come crashing down behind closed doors. Jarvis sets up the decadence and then punctures it. “Help yourself to pretzels,” he offers. Later he’ll note that “no one ever got turned on by the Whole Earth catalogue”, with an almost imperceptible guffaw.

Related: Jarvis Cocker: 'People fall in love with an illusion, something that’s never existed'

The Guardian 60

(Deutsche Grammophon)

Jarvis Cocker bleeds Sheffield, but it’s hard to imagine an artist better suited to slithering around the Chateau Marmont after Hollywood skeletons. On Room 29, a song-cycle about the fabled LA hotel, Cocker’s knack for pinpointing nihilism’s abiding allure finds a match in Chilly Gonzales’s eerily elegant piano.

While it’s easy to condemn or romanticise the Chateau, the duo mostly offer a nuanced portrait of its murky morals. “This whole place is built on a lie, but what a lie,” Cocker marvels. He’s better when he shows rather than tells: Tearjerker’s character assassination is scolding compared with Belle Boy, which celebrates a beleaguered porter’s discretion with Gainsbourgian hysteria. Room 29 sags in the forlorn middle section, but Bombshell’s nervous energy and the frenzied A Trick of the Light brilliantly expose the torment of falling for an illusion. As convincingly as Cocker describes the bind – and how “a lifetime of spectating leaves you impotent” – it’s evidently not one he’s fallen for yet.