Pulp are most famous for being the band that people who pride themselves on not choosing Oasis or Blur chose—an escape hatch from the mid-90s dichotomy, the weird, tumultuous, bitter, idiosyncratic alternative to the rest of Britpop’s compulsively anthemic bathos. All of which means that Pulp doesn’t show up much at parties, or in drunken singalongs: while songs like, say, “Champagne Supernova” were made to be shouted along with poorly, there isn’t much that can be done with Jarvis Cocker’s breathy, mumbly delivery, and there’s something about the satirical, second-guessing nature of his lyrics even in Pulp’s most accessible songs that threatens to leave the candy-craving inebriate frustrated and bummed out. For all Cocker’s sordid, leeringly explicit lyrics, Pulp were never a sex band; they were too tangled up in narrative, in examination and analysis, unable to reach the genitals without wandering around in the head first. “We learned too much at school,” Cocker famously wailed, and his inability to talk about silvery moons and holding hands without reams of compulsive back story proved it marvelously true.

But Pulp was around for a long time before that—a long time, even, before they hit upon the roundabout, intellectualized lust that would bring them British success (America never really caught on). Cocker’s first album under the Pulp name, “It,” was released in 1983, after a Peel session that impressed no one and a year at university; the band’s sophomore release, “Freaks,” was really another debut, as Cocker was the only holdover from Pulp’s previous incarnation, and you can tell: while “It” is a slapdash, awkward singer-songwriter album, “Freaks” is a weird, concept-albumy Joy Division takeoff, all gloomy sparseness and Ray Bradbury carnival mythology, billed on the cover as “ten stories about power, claustrophobia, suffocation and holding hands.” Most of it is still awkward, and much of it is dull, but exploration reveals moments that, if they don’t come near Pulp’s mid-90s commercial and artistic peak, bear their own kind of cracked merit. “Don’t You Know” is like a power-pop song suffering from, um, claustrophobia and suffocation, dipped in molasses and featuring Cocker’s laconic, amiable drone over a stuttering, monotone guitar and the occasional anomalously bright three-note flourish. Pulp’s locked-in gloom is lighter here; the song’s about not having the energy or backbone to dissolve a relationship, and revolves around the mordantly cheerful remark “If you could walk away where would you go, anyway?” The Joy Division indebtitude comes to a head on “Anorexic Beauty,” driven by a clipped guitar that does nothing but build for three minutes and yet never moves from its spot, while Cocker deadpans lines like “sultry and corpselike.”

But the strangest, most immediately arresting song on the album is “Being Followed Home” (”I don’t know what for / I don’t know by whom”), whose refusal to take its radio-melodrama self anything less than utterly seriously is mildly awesome. Foley footsteps and spidery guitar fade in slowly and come to the edge of a cliff, as Cocker gently nudges forward a knob in the studio marked “FRANTIC”; when the song breaks loose, a whiff of imagined carnival organ whirls in the blackness behind the verses, and Cocker’s unusually flowery lyrics knock against each other until coming to a head with a breathless action sequence: “A bottle smashes / The glint of a blade in the moonlight / Someone laughs… the corner’s turned… and it’s too late!” It sounds ludicrous on paper, and in a way it sounds ludicrous when you hear it, but it’s the moment on “Freaks” when the aura of awkward gloom the band’s spinning deepens and becomes believable; the moment when Cocker (and his band, which was, mostly, to change again before Pulp’s success) succeeds in providing perfect musical support for his jumpy penny-dreadful lyrics. And it’s in “Being Followed Home,” even more than in the sardonic satire of songs like “Anorexic Beauty,” that shades of the Pulp to come are most obvious—the sprawling, nervous narration; the invented short stories delivered utterly convincingly; the tumultuous but meticulously tailored musical atmosphere. There wasn’t too much changing to be done after this: what would make the band successful was Cocker’s eventual application of his knack for fiction to the mundanities of the British working class. Carnies and broken bottles are all very well, but it turns out there isn’t much money in power, claustrophobia, and suffocation. Holding hands, though: there you’re on to something.

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