A Quick Rant About Splitting Branches
Splitting Branches is a self published album by Tree and was released in 2013, 4 years before he signed with Atlantic Records.
The album has some quite aggressive sounding instruments like the guitar in Sacred Elements (my personal favourite song in the album) but his vocals are quite soft. Most of the songs are surprisingly soft and calm. His music style has evolved a lot over the last 7 years. A lot of the songs on the album are done with a childhood friend like Shelf Nunny, Lena Kuhn, Kirsten Rosenburg, Aropsia,Ariel Thiermann, Finn Rivera. There are 9 songs in the album which is 28 minutes and 48 seconds.
The overall feel of the album is quite trippy and soothing. The drums are calm and slow and the vocals are smooth, soothing and a little bit alien. The guitar in most of the songs compliment the drums and vocals and don’t try to stand out but in Sacred Elements the guitar attacks your ears after hearing calm songs for a while, and is quite enjoyable. The bass is also extremely aggressive.
In People (the starting song) sets the mood for the rest of the album exceptionally with Tree’s soft vocals, the lo-fi drums and the guitar playing in the background.
Now I will rank my personal favourite songs from the album starting at 9. Btw i found it extremely tricky to rank the songs as they are all roughly as good as each other.
9. From Red to Blues. I’m ranking this at 10 because there are so many songs like this such as Resonance by Home, it just doesn’t try to be different like the rest of the songs. I still enjoy it though.
8. Tully. It just doesn’t appeal to me.
7. People. It is very abstract and special but it isn’t his best work.
6. Tully is the juicy stuff but it definitely gets juicier.
5. Artemisia is where Tree properly starts to experiment with his instruments but it 100% gets better.
4. Seperation. I think that separation is here because some of the instruments Tree uses do not really compliment his fantastic voice. It is definitely better than the other songs up here.
3.Universal. This is here because of the amazing harmonica and the rhythm of the song in general.
2.Warriors is here because it has some very abstract elements. The sounds in the song feels like Tree has just grabbed them from a 90’s arcade from when he was growing up.
1. Sacred Elements deserves to be here because I adore bass which Tree has plenty of here and the extremely irate guitar stabbing your ears pleasantly.
Now I highly recommend you check out this album as it is one of a kind. His music was too advanced for 2013 but now Oliver Tree is thriving. I will link the album in the description.
