This album wasn't supposed to be this good. Pulp were, by all standards, washed up; their best work was far behind them, and I was one of the few who thought This Is Hardcore was basically an ambitious misfire. Jarvis Cocker's propensity for favoring drama over melody had finally caught up with him, and while "I Spy" was a great enough song on the relatively varied Different Class, with This Is Hardcore we had an entire album of "I Spy"s. To make matters worse, the band had enlisted Scott Walker to produce the record, and as everyone who's heard the man's albums knows, Scott Walker is good at many things, but he is not good at melody. So how the hell did this happen? We Love Life is Pulp's most melodic and well-composed album in six years, even giving their 1993-1995 work a run for its money. It's just great rock music, rousing and beautiful in all the right places, with a marked pastoral influence that shows itself in tracks like "Weeds", "Wickerman" and "Roadkill". Ironically enough, the tracks most reminiscent of Pulp's earlier material ("Bob Lind", "Bad Cover Version") are the weakest; the band slides so effectively into this new, more acoustic incarnation that they seem to have been doing it their whole career. It takes a damn good record to make a title like "We Love Life" seem non-ironic, and even harder if you're Pulp. Probably the best swan song of the decade, and a great surprise to find it on this list.
MY RATING: 8.7
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