![]() The reggae-influenced “Bury Me Alive” pivots quickly to West Coast hip-hop. More aligned with his provocateur image is the ominous, bizarre rap “Joke’s on You!” “My whole life was just a joke/But I’m still not laughing,” he moans, channeling a familiar crimson-lipped antihero before leaping into Eminem-style rapping. Tree’s voice-always a little shouty, a little whiny-is riddled with distortion, casting a fuzzed-out sameness over even the more left-field selections, like the runway thumper “1993.” After a while, you wonder why he doesn’t hurry up and join Twenty One Pilots. Ugly Is Beautiful is bloated at 14 tracks, with several recycled singles in the mix. The catchy electro pop-punk opener, “Me, Myself & I,” recalls early 2010s radio favorite Neon Trees, as does keep-your-head-up jam “Again & Again.” Billie Joe Armstrong’s congested groan haunts songs like “Introspective” and “Jerk.” Ugly Is Beautiful is an amalgam of genres like alternative rock, hip-hop, and electro-pop, with most of the tracks not straying far from what lands on the Hot Rock & Alternative chart. Anyone who’s seen two seconds of a Jake Paul vlog will yawn through Tree’s monster trucks and burning cars nothing this novice troll does can obliterate brain cells like “ They COVERED My LAMBORGHINI IN PEANUT BUTTER!! (prank).” Still, for an artist chasing shock and bombast, Oliver Tree’s music is surprisingly tame. To a generation that’s been bludgeoned senseless by the 24-hour news cycle, a dude with a bad haircut in a silly outfit might seem unbelievably dull. He finally dropped Ugly Is Beautiful last week, and like clockwork, announced that he was quitting music to focus on filmmaking. But he returned in May, when a “mysterious hacker” took over his socials and demanded one million Instagram comments in exchange for the album art and release date. In March, Tree declared that his debut, Ugly Is Beautiful, was officially canceled due to the pandemic, and apologized with the arena-sized “Let Me Down,” on which he howls from the perspective of a fan who’s grown tired of his shit. In interviews, the artist delivers winning jokes like mispronouncing “COVID” as “Coviod” he threatens to retire, it seems, every other week. “You can’t win unless you polarize people right now,” proclaims Atlantic A&R rep Jeff Levin, who signed Tree in 2017. For his gimmicks, Tree has been heralded as the “ trickster laureate of pop’s viral era” and cast as a Warholian insider skewering the music industry.
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