We Love Pulp (We Love Life - Pulp)

Member Name: kfingleton

Product:	We Love Life - Pulp
Date:	05/11/01 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More polished with stronger songs

Disadvantages: Less 'instant'

“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 dark This Is Hardcore. We Love Life therefore shows a more bourgeois Jarvis, somewhat more upbeat, but the heart of Pulp is still beating.

Beginning at the beginning we have Misshapes Mk II, or weeds, as it is known here. While lyrically it covers old ground, musically it is more polished and complex music than what we are used to with Pulp. The organic sound that the producer Scot Walker has given this album is perfectly complementary to the horticultural metaphor used in this track. “We are the weeds”, Cocker proclaims. It marks a strong opener.

Weeds II (The Origin Of The Species) is a moody piece, that again musically captures the lyrical, druggy content of the lyrics. This track is a spoken piece, which Cocker reads well, with just the right amount of pretention, but not too much that they don’t get away with it.

The Night Minnie Timberly Died is very reminiscent of the Pulp of way back when… This poppy track could fit snugly on His ‘n’ Hers. The content is again dark, dealing with death you would expect as much. I would guess that this is a future single, it is certainly stronger than Sunrise or Trees as far as being radio-friendly is concerned. “It’s such a beautiful world / You’re such a beautiful girl
221; is the most positive thing Cocker has said in a long time. This track is very strong.

You should know Trees by now, although it has hardly infested the radio waves. The loop effect of the strings marks this one out as a sort of more upbeat This Is Hardcore. Definitely a great song, but it is hard to see why it was chosen as a single, it you ask me. Cocker also seems to blame the trees for the disasters in his love life, which seems a little harsh, considering they can’t speak.

Wickerman is another spoken word track. It is arty and bourgeois but at the same time its dark content and seedy lyrics give it an undeniably gritty and dirty feeling of edginess to it. Again this is partly due to Cocker, not only to his reading of the words, but of the words themselves. Frankly, I think that he’s the closest we have to a poet in popular music today and this is the best demonstration of it. It is an excellent track, but I doubt if it would sound any good removed from the album itself.

Next up is the more upbeat I Love Life, this has all the strengths of a good single until the finale, which is a wonderful blend of white noise and crashing sounds, strangely euphoric and catastrophic at the same time. This is a track to watch out for.

The Birds In Your Garden must be a future single, very like the sound of His ‘n’ Hers, but with a twist of nature. Reminds me of Do You Remember The First Time, especially the guitars. Strangely for Pulp, it is a love song that is genuinely without the seediness of tracks like Disco 2000. It is without the humour of old, because “it’s only natural”. It’s poetic and all the more beautiful for it with lines like “I kissed your eyes awake”.

The next track, Bob Lind, is very Divine Comedy (surely the most middle class music ever), especially with the guitar riff in the chorus. The cello is a good addition, but there are all sorts o
f wonderful effects in the background. Kudos to Mr Walker for the production on this track especially, but then you can’t do wonders with a crap song and this is one of the strongest in terms of ‘access’. “This is where I fall apart”? Certainly not musically, anyway.

Bad Cover Version has all the sounds of a Christmas single too it. The strings are faint in the background but add wonderful warmth. Lennon-esque, insomuch as it reminds me of Watching The Wheels, which is no bad thing at all. The finale seals this track as a genuine classic. The lyrical wit returns so wonderfully “Like a late Tom & Gerry / When the two of them could talk Like the Stones since the eighties / Like the last days of Southfork / Like Planet of the Apes on TV / the second side of Till the Band Comes In / Like an own brand of cornflakes / He’s gonna let you down my friend”. Superb!

Roadkill is like Sounds Of Silence era Simon & Garfunkel and showcases a more gentle and fragile lyrical style from Cocker. The lyrics are wonderful “All these things I can’t forget / Though I don’t see you anymore”. This is a fragile love song, with so much insecurity woven into it, it really does pluck at the heart-strings without reverting to boring clichés. The sounds Walker adds here reminds me of the work Owen Morris put into A Northern Soul by the Verve.

Sunrise may have been a bit of a dud for a single, but it is right at home as the finale to this album. It really is nothing short of epic. It echoes Albatross by Fleetwood Mac in my view, but this is hardly a bad thing. It has the same sort of frantic ending that Blowout, by Radiohead has but in a more organic way. The synth choir also reminds me of the wonderful Roll It Over by Oasis. The drums are frantic at times and them guitar really superbly distorted. This track is far too good for the radio and all the crap that you hear on it and the
useless egotistical DJs who would have to play it. It’s possibly the best song I’ve heard all year.

That was pretty positive, wasn’t it? Well it should be because We Love Life is the strongest Pulp album to date and definitely one of the finest albums of the year (which isn’t really that much of a feat considering how few decent albums have been released). This is not the shiny Pulp of old. This is more sophisticated, more technical, more fragile, more bourgeois, but at the same time it’s more passionate, so Pulp are still working class.

Summary: