Oliver Tree: Ugly Is Beautiful review – an intriguing career showstopper

I’ll be honest with you: I hate Oliver Tree. It’s something I’ve realised since first hearing his boisterous, memorable hit single Hurt a year or two ago. Tree sits uncomfortably within the liminal space between comedic actor and reality, displaying an obnoxious, money-grabbing and at times absurd character to his large and increasingly devoted following. He is loud and self-centred, and primarily uses social media to beg for likes with the promise of a new morsel of engineered content to lob out to the baying masses. (Incidentally, his most recent attempt at this fell short by a few hundred thousand likes, but he went ahead with the stunt anyway). The build up to his ‘seminal’ debut album Ugly Is Beautiful has been exhausting for even the most reluctant follower of Oliver Tree. After promising the album (and pre-album tour) would go ahead despite coronavirus, Tree announced just a day before the original release date that the album was officially cancelled, only for it to be dramatically announced as simply a postponement until June (as it happened, the album was later postponed another month due to the Black Lives Matter protests). Of course, I shouldn’t be taking this all so seriously. Tree is a parody of a parody and probably (hopefully) insincere in his antics, but nonetheless the constant plea for attention has annoyed me, sincere or otherwise.

Thankfully for Tree, the harsh truth is that you don’t have to be a good person to make good music. Hurt was a song that in many ways defined my 2019, and early singles like Movement, All I Got and Fuck all provided their own opportunities for Tree to scream his signature yelps over an impressive array of electronic, hip hop and alt-rock backings. Ugly Is Beautiful is supposedly Oliver Tree’s lifelong labour of love, and he claims he’ll be quitting music forever after this release, although, of course, there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about that.

Bop-hungry fans are introduced to UIB with opener Me, Myself & I, which kicks off like a derivative early Strokes track before briefly chopping things up for a chorus. Unfortunately, the song doesn’t really make much progress from the first verse, and I find myself begging for some anthemic hook or change of form. The follow-up, 1993 is more of a punch to the face than a song, and is one of the most memorable of the bunch with an almost comically massive synth bass. It also features a dubious feature from Little Ricky ZR3, the only featured artist on the album. I say dubious because no one actually knows who Little Ricky ZR3 really is (this is his first ever released recording) and there is much speculation online suggesting that this feature may actually be foreshadowing a future change in persona for Tree. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the title, fans would no doubt assume the ‘feature’ was just Tree’s vocals pitched down and with extra distortion.

Ever since I first heard the next track Cash Machine in the epic run-up to the album release, I’ve felt like it was one of Tree’s weakest tracks to date. The guitar-driven verses are annoying, and the sudden jolt into a hookless electronic chorus is enough to give a first-time listener motion sickness. Thankfully, tracks like Let Me Down and Miracle Man offer much more seamless genre-mashing, and succeed in both being catchy and distinctly Oliver Tree.

There’s always going to be that excruciating expectation of cringe when a typically melody-only vocalist like Tree dabbles with rap, but he just about gets away with it on Bury Me Alive. Classic 90s disc-scratching sounds work out as a tasteful and somewhat amusing addition to Tree’s sound, and an almost reggae chorus provides some valuable space to breathe between the all-in verses, both for Tree and the listener.

The particularly whiny vocals on Again & Again may divide opinion, but personally I liked this single-worthy pop song. Here Oliver Tree and band are at their tightest, and a shuffling drum groove meshes well with the guitars. As always, tambourine instantly elevates the groove to new levels. The following track, Waste My Time is similarly sharp, and has something of a Gorillaz Feel Good Inc. feel about it. In contrast, Introspective fails to find its footing, and annoyingly twinkly guitars sit on just the wrong side of annoying. It’s admirable that Tree is trying to slow things down (UIB is full of adrenaline-pumping bangers), but this just isn’t the way to do it.

With UIB being hailed as a seminal album for Tree (even though it’s his debut), I was expecting a grand finish, and I was not disappointed. In fact, I’m Gone is one of the best songs on the whole album, with a relatively minimalist bass and drums combo exploding into life at the close of a brooding opening verse. From there on the song just gets more explosive, with Tree screaming at the limits of his range on the edges of cavernous stops in the groove. By the end of the song we’re hit with the full force of a band now complete with heavily distorted guitars, and the result is a spectacular firework display of a rock song.

The music may be hit and miss, but the magic of Oliver Tree lies within the surprising lyrics. Take Me, Myself & I for example. Rather than bragging about Ferraris and Rolexes like his rap contemporaries, Tree shows some vulnerability. Tree isn’t the king of the world, instead he “can barely talk” and feels “too weak to walk”. As Tree says himself in the pre-chorus “I’m contradicting all the stupid shit I say”. In fact, the whole album (and indeed, Tree’s whole discography) is peppered with self-doubt seemingly about Tree’s all-consuming and very hateable public persona. “The truth is, I think I’ve said enough […] I’m close to the edge people tell me I should jump”, he shouts on Joke’s on You!. “You’re somebody else, why can’t you just be yourself”, he asks himself on 1993. Hidden in these songs is reassurance that beneath the persona, there is still a real man there, and he seems just as confused as everyone else. Of course, it begs the question, why doesn’t Tree just be genuine or, at the very least, nice? By implicitly asking his fans this question, Tree brings up questions about the benefits of being genuine and online in the 2020s. Is being a comic and entirely fake character online preferable to surrendering your privacy for a lifetime? Generous critics are likely to see Tree himself as a grand meta art piece about the nature of fame and honesty in today’s world, and that may well be his guiding vision beneath the superficial Instagram likes goals and the endless quest for more attention and more Spotify streams.

If his recent statements are to be trusted, Ugly Is Beautiful marks the end of Oliver Tree’s music career, or at least as we know it. The album closer, I’m Gone, has provided fans a treasure trove of hints about Tree’s creative future to obsess over, with the consensus being that Little Ricky ZR3’s career is about to kick into gear. “They will always find you” are the haunting final words of the album, and indeed with the wild success of UIB, it may well be impossible for Tree to return to the brief obscurity of his early career, no matter what name he chooses to work under next.

Whilst most albums tell you more about the artist, the more you listen to UIB, the more you begin to question who Oliver Tree is at all. I’ve listened to many hours of his music and still I don’t know if I hate the man or just his public veil of contempt. UIB is not without its fair share of duds but for all its shortcomings, I’ll be hard pressed to find a more lyrically fascinating album all year.