We Love Life - Pulp

PULP We Love Life I bought this CD with a great sense of trepidation. Having waited for what seemed like an ice age together with the prospect of the Scott Walker collaboration, I was positively salivating and this outing certainly does provide food for thought. For those of you who are wondering who the hell Scott Walker is, to be honest I?m not all that sure, but I will just say that I got into the Walker Brothers in 1997, after Jarvis mentioned them on Jools Holland. Yes, very tragic on my part, I know, but I rushed out and bought The Best Of The Walker Brothers that very week.. For reference it has excellent renditions of ?The Sun Ain?t ...  Read the complete review

“You’ll never live like common people / You’ll never do what common people do”. That’s what Jarvis Cocker proclaimed way back in those wondrous Britpop days of 1995 in Pulp’s working class anthem Common People. Which is a strange thing to say when you think about it. Those of us who are middle class cannot be working class, but it seems that the opposite can happen if We Love Life is any way to judge by it. Because, you see, Cocker and friends come across very bourgeois on this album. It’s all about gardens and nature, not seedy things like pornography and growing old addressed in this album’s direct predecessor, the ...  Read the complete review

Four years ago, Pulp released their ‘This is Hardcore’ about the miserable existence of celebritydom, following the unprecedented success of ‘Different Class.’ Today, Jarvis Cocker and gang are back to their usual chirpy (yet still sardonic) selves, proudly screaming out to the world that they are alive and kicking with their new release ‘We love live.’ Produced by the sometime musical legend Scott Walker, ‘We love life’ is something of a concept album, with Jarvis explaining that it comes from the heart of someone who doesn’t have a garden, imagining what it must be like to have one. The band have donned ...  Read the complete review

Things haven’t been too healthy in the Pulp camp of late, after the critical and commercial acclaim which greeted their 1995 release ‘Different Class’ it hasn’t been hard to observe a general downward curve. The furore which accompanied lead singer Jarvis Cocker’s ‘protest’ against Michael Jackson’s performance at the 96 Brit awards seemingly permanently transformed the group from ‘that band who sang Common People’ to ‘that band whose singer mooned at Wacko Jacko’! To make matters worse the follow up to ‘Different Class’, ‘This is Hardcore’ which was either their ...  Read the complete review

This album is just indicative of the current trend of new albums being released by several great bands - it's a weak effort! Pumpkins' Machina, Suede's Head Music, Radiohead's Amnesiac, and U2's All that u can't leave behind - were all hugely disappointing coming form my A-list of bands. Maybe i'm just getting a bit impatient with music nowadays, but I did give this album a chance. Listening to it over and over again has not changed my opinion. There are elements in the album that give away its 'preachy' side like Weeds (on asylum-seekers), Trees (how obvious), but it becomes annoying that that's all these songs are worth ...  Read the complete review