Review Summary: This is the true story of the Freaks: the origin of the species.
In the middle of the night is when the darkness settles in, and for some, when all becomes uneasy... when you look around as you're walking alone down the sidewalk by the road for anyone suspicious, although maybe some of the people out of the ordinary are just that... just normal, everyday people... but there's something off about the way they look, the way they dress. Maybe it's a bit more than that. Maybe they're not from this city... this country, this planet. Maybe they're something else entirely. Maybe they're not human. Maybe I'm not human. You see, the first album I listened to when I arrived on Earth from some other planet somewhere off in the vastness of space made me feel somewhat nervous, somewhat shaken. It felt off, but just the right amount to where it wouldn't alert me to something being... totally, totally wrong. And somehow... it made me comfortable. I knew that maybe I was a freak, but Pulp... they were reveling in it as something positive.
Freaks was Pulp's second album, and it represents a much, much darker change in sound from the band, incomparable to the wistful joy of their first album, entitled "It", which was released four years earlier. After a few good, although unsuccessful stand-alone singles released between the two albums, and with the addition of some of what would become their core members later on (particularly Russell Senior and Candida Doyle), Freaks was released somewhat belatedly in 1987 (as they were beginning to premiere some of the songs from their next record "Separations" live), and in some ways was more consistently powerful than their previous album, although not all their experimentation worked entirely either. Pulp's sound, by this time, was still a far cry from what they were later known for with "His 'n' Hers" and "Different Class". Instead, during this period, they sounded much more gothic and influenced by some of the more darker, underground music of the mid-Eighties. However, they still were able to make it all sound mostly theirs on their own.
As the needle slowly comes down onto the record, as you're alone in what could be considered the very early morning with the speakers made sure not to be too loud so as to not disturb the neighbors or the ones living with you, you're greeted with a soft narration by new member, guitarist Russell Senior on the opener "Fairground" that slowly transforms itself into an absolutely demented vocal describing the "cat with two heads and the dog with eight legs", while you're either listening intently and unaffected as you laugh it off because of the silliness of the idea that the band that later recorded songs like "I Spy" and "Seductive Barry" was ten years earlier including the soundtrack for a dodgy Halloween party as the opener of an album; or, rather, you're absolutely terrified from listening to the song because of how tired and impressionable you've become through the night when you should've gone to sleep hours ago but instead you decided to stay up and listen to one of the most demented records of a band that if you asked many, weren't associated with a scary, circus nightmare but the great, fun, thrilling times they spent listening to "Disco 2000" or dancing to "Common People" or just being absolutely terrified of the "This is Hardcore" album not because of it intentionally -trying- to be frightening, but because it came from a scary time in the band's history and because of drugs and breakups and alcohol and just from the stress and pain of being one of the largest pop groups in Britain at the time. Freaks was made to be an unnerving and intimidating listen, and it shows.
Although the band's sound is still very, very much unlike what they'd become known for later on, like their debut, it still manages to come off as fresh and different and has a reason to exist and thrive on its own. It's definitely essential to Pulp's history as a band, and they'd be much better off with Freaks in their back-catalogue than without it. Plus, this album truly does sound frightening at times, although, as I said, not in the same way "This is Hardcore" would pull off with shining colors just eleven years later. Songs like "Being Followed Home", "Anorexic Beauty" and "There's No Emotion" are detached and chilling, like tattered remnants of clothes left on a corpse for years and years and left to decay, forgotten over time. "I Want You" and "Life Must Be So Wonderful" showcase Jarvis Cocker starting to grow as a vocalist, and they even almost foreshadow later Pulp ballads like "TV Movie" and "Something Changed". And when the experiments and tunes don't quite work out (particularly on the quite laughable "Master of the Universe", which mentions a "master" masturbating in the corner of his house), they're at least somewhat of a curious and interesting listen anyway.
Freaks is the sound of a band growing and starting to discover what they're really capable of. Although these songs sound almost nothing like the Pulp that most know of today, they're definitely an improvement on their first record and, as a whole, comprise more of a truly great, standalone record in its own right. And even this album alone doesn't tell the full story: the singles prior to this record ("Little Girl (with Blue Eyes)", "Dogs are Everywhere") and this particular album's B-sides show the band experimenting even further, although not always successfully. For instance, "Tunnel", the 8-minute long other half of the "They Suffocate at Night" single, is Pulp's first attempt at what they'd start perfecting on "My Legendary Girlfriend" and "Sheffield Sex City", and it's nowhere near as good as those two. For some reason, "Master of the Universe" was released as a single, and on the other side was a song called "Silence", which sounds like an abortion happening live in the studio being recorded to reel-to-reel tape. It's not good.
Nevertheless, although Freaks wasn't near perfection, although it was much different to what the band would make just several years later... that was what I liked about it. In 1987, Pulp was a band faced with a choice: to either stand out and be different and be heard, or to give up, create a forgettable album and fade away from the collective consciousness. With this album, Pulp chose the former: to become fine with being themselves, being freaks of nature, and laughing all of it off as they went on with their lives, content as the round pegs in the square holes.
