Lo-fi music comes in many forms, and one of them is a band called “We Are Trees”. As far as I can tell, there are only three consistent members, including a guitarist/vocalist, violinist, and drummer. We Are Trees falls into the folk-ier side of lo-fi, with acoustic guitar driven music filled with breathy and light vocals. In 2010, they released a four song EP, entitled “Boyfriend”. The length of this EP is very short, the contents of which were pretty straightforward and ritualistic of the lo-fi folk genre.
The acoustic guitar never really does anything too surprising; a simplistic chord progression is usually applied to each song. It almost feels as if the only thing that changes in the acoustic guitar between each song is the key. The same can be said for the singing. Although it’s very nice and mindful of its surrounding style, it feels as if you could take the vocals of any song and match them up with any of the others and make it work. That being said, it does feel like the entirety of the tracks sort of mesh together to make one long statement, considering the similar vocal melodies, instrumentation, mood, and subject matter.
So what exactly is this statement? The lyrics are difficult to completely decipher, but after looking them up, I found them to be extremely vague and simplistic. The statement that they’re trying to make is obscured by the strange lyrics; it’s extremely hard to understand the “point” to some of these songs. It seems like there are themes of love, confusion, and identity, but I can’t be certain.
“Stop, Your heartbeat will fall
and I will cry until you wake up” – “Sunrise Sunset”
“I, I know
Where to go,
Darlin', I'm tired
Won't, won't we go
Darlin' won't you help me
Help me out
'Cause we know,
That this won't last” – “Daniel”
Simplicity seems to be a mantra for the band. The only thing that is pretty detailed is the layering of guitar/vocals/drums/strings over the tracks (which sounds great in the mix, the production is pretty good for lo-fi).
Another thing that I noticed was that the vocalist seems to depend too much on singing “oh”. Throughout the short EP it is used quite a lot, and it almost comes off a little bit as a gimmick to me. It loses its charm after it’s used in the first song. By the time the last track, “Final Round”, reprises the “oh” singing, it felt like a bit of a put-off to me.
The songwriting itself isn’t bad, and the production fits the “lo-fi” label in a lovely way, but it seems to grow a little weary by the end of the EP, regardless of how short it is.
All of this analysis assumes that the band was going for a clear message and variety in instrumentation/style. I get the feeling that this isn’t what the band was really going for with this EP. It’s very possible that it serves to be listened to as one long piece of art, vague enough to be interpreted in different ways. Most importantly, it projects a certain mood that is expected of a lo-fi folk band. In short, this is easy listening music; there are no major tricks or deeper elements to catch with this EP. And I like the music a whole lot more when I keep this in mind. There isn’t anything truly spectacular about “Boyfriend”, but it is a nice listen for any fan of lo-fi folk. It’s definitely worth checking out, in my opinion. Their music can be found on their bandcamp page, wearetrees.bandcamp.com.
6/10
