The first time I heard Pulp’s pastoral swan song I felt disappointed. It was confusing; Pulp’s discography before this had a perfect sort of arc when you look back at it. It all seems as premeditated as the arc of a rocket shooting, but then something goes wrong, it goes wild and flies off course. This might sound dramatic (especially for such a gentle album) but coming after the suffocating cocaine nightmare This is Hardcore, We Love Life, from it’s title to it’s poppy songs, seems like a compromise.
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The video for “Bad Cover Version” is still one of the funniest music videos you’ll ever see.
After learning a bit more about We Love Life, I’ve come to respect it more than any other Pulp album. Pulp was recording a totally different follow up to This is Hardcore, one most likely going even further down the rabbit hole of sex and addiction that Hardcore reveled in. But Jarvis Cocker ended the sessions, took some time, and started work on an entirely different album. The new album was gentler, warmer, funnier, and more in touch with nature; but perhaps the biggest change was the dismissal of producer Chris Thomas in exchange for one of Cocker’s heroes: Scott Walker.
If this all seems too perfect, believe me I’m right there with you. A band, fed up with their current sound and tied down by the Britpop crowd, wants to make something different so they [begin hyperbole] hire the fallen god of 60s pop music. Walker: the man who had a fan club as big as the Beatles and walked away from it all so he could write songs inspired by Ingmar Bergman and Lenin, who had been enjoying a return to prominence ever since his masterful 90s album Tilt [end hyperbole].
Point is, We Love Life sounds like a weird career move (and without the context, perhaps even a cop-out), but it’s so much more than that. It’s Pulp at some of their most musically adventurous (“The Trees”), funny (“Bad Cover Version”), and beautifully creepy (“Wickerman”). Not to mention “Birds in Your Garden,” one of the best make-out songs by a band with enough great make-out music to fill a two disc compilation.
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There are two tracks on here that elevate “We Love Life” to an even higher level of brilliance, though. First of all there’s the almost-title track. “I Love Life,” a song that a younger Jarvis Cocker would have made sound bitter and cynical, but here, after Britpop’s reign, after all the cocaine, and yes, after 9/11, Cocker sounds sincere, sad, and hopeful. His admission of “I love my life, it’s the only reason I’m alive,” sounds honest, though hard-won.
The final track, “Sunrise,” remains one of the great swan songs of any band. After so many albums focused on partying, club-life, sex, and drugs, Cocker’s song about facing the sunrise is one of his best lyrical moments. “I used to hate the sun because it shone on everything I’d done,” Cocker wearily begins. The song is tired; the party is finally over, and he is finally ready to move on.
“Sunrise” may sound lyrically similar to “Bar Italia,” the final song on Different Class. In “Bar Italia,” Cocker and his date are accidentally a part of the morning rush as they pass by people on their way to work, but they’re tourists visiting another world. There’s something very oppressive about the morning when you’ve been out all night. I’ve found the experience of still being up partying while people are on their way to work incredibly unsettling. It feels like you don’t belong out there, like you’re an outsider, and that’s what makes “Sunrise” so goddamn cathartic. Because on “Bar Italia” Cocker and his date are rushing to find a place to get inside, and “Sunrise” finds Cocker looking right on at this bright world with a smile. He’s excited and he’s hopeful; he’s looking to change.
He reminds me most of all of Mark “Rentboy” Renton, the heroin addicted hero of Trainspotting. Renton finally escapes from his destructive lifestyle in the early morning, running past all the people on their way to the office. There’s a chance that he may take all that money he has, mess up and get hooked again, and there’s a chance that Cocker will fall back into the lifestyle captured so perfectly on This is Hardcore, but he’s finally reflecting and realizing what he wants and that intention is what counts. It makes for the perfect ending to this bands career.
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People have recently petitioned to get We Love Life a deluxe release, in hopes of hearing the abandoned first sessions. While it would be interesting, I think that it may be better to just let them stay buried. While so many other Britpop bands tried to keep the party going as the 90s came to an end, Pulp made the right decision. Compared to those other bands, Pulp always felt not just smarter, but more sensitive, and We Love Life is the truest testament to that.