Beyond the Pale is the debutstudio album by British rock band Jarv Is, led by former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. The studio album incorporates live recordings, and was defined by the group as an "alive album". It was released by Rough Trade Records on 17 July 2020, having been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, and received widespread acclaim upon release, with multiple critics characterising it as Cocker's best work since Pulp.
Background and recording
Jarv Is were formed in late 2017, to perform at Sigur Ros' Norður og Niður festival in Iceland. The group was "conceived as a way of writing songs in collaboration with an audience". They began recording their performances to assist their songwriting, until Geoff Barrow suggested the recordings could be used as the foundations of an album. "Must I Evolve?" and "Sometimes I Am Pharaoh" were recorded during a performance in Peak Cavern, Derbyshire on 7 April 2018, while "Children of the Echo" was recorded during the band's performance at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona on 1 June 2019. The rest of the album, including vocals and overdubs for all tracks, was recorded at Narcissus Studios in Neasden, London in June and September 2019, with the exception the piano and bass parts of "Swanky Modes", which had been recorded at Paris' Red Bull Studios on 5 March 2015.
Release
"Must I Evolve?" was released on 15 May 2019, as the band's debut single. On 2 March 2020, the band released "House Music All Night Long", and announced the album on Steve Lamacq's BBC Radio 6 show. It was originally scheduled to be released by Rough Trade Records on 1 May 2020, but was pushed back to 4 September due to the coronavirus pandemic, before eventually being brought forward to 17 July. In June, the band shared a music video for opening track "Save the Whale".
Critical reception
Beyond the Pale received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a score of 88, based on 11 critics, signifying "universal acclaim". For The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick described the album as Cocker's "resounding comeback", writing that it is "the best thing has done since Pulp, and that is very good indeed". Tom Pinnock for Uncut and Andrew Trendell for NME similarly suggested that the album is Cocker's best since Pulp's This is Hardcore. Reviewing the album for DIY, Lisa Wright praised the album for standing on its own, writing, "It would be easy, given his illustrious catalogue, to judge Jarvis Cocker against his past, but that would unfair to what Jarv Is have achieved together". Ryan Leas of Stereogum characterised it as "a haggard and meditative late-career album", praising Cocker's lyrics and maturation, and writing, "It’s heartening to hear Cocker singing something adjacent to pop music again". For The Observer, Kitty Empire wrote, "This is a great record: the first utterance, hopefully, of a new set of echoes". In a more mixed review, Exclaim!s Alex Whetham praised Cocker's lyrics but found the album's music to be inconsistent. Ben Cardew of Pitchfork similarly praised Cocker's songwriting, but criticised the album's lack of cohesion, writing, "The hybrid stage/studio setup captures the sprawl of a live gig without the excitement and possibility, and the sheen of a studio recording without the cohesion and refinement".
