The Best of the Trees - Volume I
Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Dickens's "Mystery of Edwin Drood":
These are all works of art left incomplete by their creators, works that have invited speculation
and fantasy for years. Those with a love for popular music would immediately add "Odd Time for a Grapefruit"
-- the legendary, lost Trees album, begun and abandoned in the early-1980s -- to this list.
It has inspired articles, books and millions of hours of conversation (predominantly amongst members of
the group).
Some fragments from the recording sessions were lost including the seminal,
"Cloud 9" recorded at the time for a radio competition.
(No copies were made as The Trees were so utterly sure of winning - they didn't). Much more has been bootlegged and circulated
like holy writ among collectors, most of whom would agree that "Odd Time" was the greatest album
that was thankfully never made.
It is difficult to convey now the eagerness with which it was anticipated. In the middle of 1981,
The Trees had issued "The Bedroom Sessions," a cycle of unfailingly imaginative, painfully tender
melodies that encapsulated the dissolutionment of 80's youth in Thatcher's Britain. "Bedroom Sessions" dazzled everybody
from Leonard Bernstein to Paul McCartney, and seemed to herald a new sort of pop music that would
meld an all-but-unprecedented intimacy of expression with near-symphonic scope. "Mr Man"
followed -- the precursor to an album that would be known as "Odd Time" And then there was a long
silence.
But the original "Odd Time" was conceived as a celebration of innocence -- a "cosmic giggle" --
by 4 very awkward teenagers. Since then Tree frontman, Gordon "Specs"
Mcpherson has spent
most of his life struggling with drink, depression and mental illness; his songwriting partner, Ewen,
sold his soul to the 80's devil that was commercial stadium rock; and whatever remained of the group itself long ago
dissolved into a squalid series of suits, countersuits and name calling.
Still, here it is -- a reconstructed version of "Odd Time". Lovingly reconstructed
from what the Trees have described as "the only bits left". Should you go out and buy "The Best of The Trees"? Of course you should.
It contains almost an hour of rare and idiosyncratic music by the masters of pop. But whether
the disc bears much relation to the "Odd Time" that might have been is a more difficult matter.
"The Best of The Trees" is not so much a completion of the original
work as a sort of suite assembled from "Odd Time" fragments -- "Odd Time's Greatest Hits," as it were.
Aside from the lost tracks ("The Little Song", "Cloud 9"), virtually nothing on the record has changed,
except for the format in which the songs are presented, compact disc. If you own the "Odd Time" bootlegs,
you own virtually all of the music on this album, and nothing about this 2004 issue
feels uplifting or even especially interesting.
The songs themselves? Gorgeous, giddy, ambitious, off, strangely out of time. I've always felt that Ewen and McPherson were
better judged as the creators of electro-acoustical soundscapes than as a traditional songwriters.
"The Best of The Trees" is made up of fractured, elaborately ornamented musical tableaux, distinguished by
their brevity, their vaporous, all-but-intangible beauties and their sheer sonic confusion.
"The Best of The Trees" is available now (from unusual sources). Own it and treasure it.
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