Environmental warnings in the sickly, sarcastic tones of Jarvis Cocker should be a winner. The Trees marks one of the few shaky moments in Pulp’s momentous rise and their cooling-off period with We Love Life. They had the fallout of a musical genre they did not want to be part of on their hands and took to the shadows following This is Hardcore. Relaxed and away from the blinding lights of the press, the band were free to explore routes and relationships they had not yet experienced in their music. Drafting in Richard Hawley on guitar and Scott Walker to produce We Love Life has a seismic impact on the shape of the band, the lustful tones of singles Bad Cover Version and Sunrise, and ultimately reflects a band who knows their end is nigh.
Hints at this come from album closer Sunrise, one of the better singles releases found on We Love Life. It would follow The Trees, a clunky number about rooted plants which proved useless trees were keeping us full of oxygen. Cocker detects a hint of leaf mould and thanks nature for the breath in his lungs, but it falls foul of what would be the album’s greatest strength. Sentimentality. Cocker looks back on his youth, the pellet-free gun in his grandmother’s home producing the first line, a conjured-up experience of knocking birds out of the sky. The Trees becomes an apology for an unexpected event coupled with a potential pun on leaves. In an album full of reminiscent experiences and the desire to reconnect with lost relatives and intimate partners, The Trees stands tall as an oddity.
At least the instrumental weaving its way through is a neat addition. Pulp certainly benefitted from Walker in the studio. His slick ideas and the natural urge to turn some of these songs into giant walls of sound benefit the band greatly. Tell your experiences to the trees though, they may listen as they cannot go anywhere. Cocker hitting against “those useless trees” should feel stronger but his monotone and almost expressionless style here is lacking the jolt featured in other We Love Life works. What it lacks in the jolt of life it makes up for in those long stretches of isolation, the carved names in tree trunks hoping to cement an eternity of tenderness. Fell the trees, then. Cocker does so with some half-baked but inherently biting, obvious expressions of how useless the trees are.
Are they expressions of a dead love or does Cocker find himself hacking away at the trunks for no good reason? Whatever the case, his axe is blunt here and mimics the simpler forms Pulp had initially rallied against. A premature piece of apparent mockery which cannot carve its own state, not when featured among the likes of Wickerman. Cocker is spent after writing the eight-minute epic and with The Trees, there is a feeling of unfinished, afterthought material to it. A band on the backburner of the public’s mind by 2001 half-heartedly jab at nature as a metaphor for relationships breaking down. It warms as part of the album but on its own, The Trees are felled all too easily.
