Forest for the Trees - Forest for the Trees (Dreamworks) Carl Stephenson, the man behind Forest for the Trees, has a claim to fame. He once worked with Beck, so he's had his fifteen minutes of fame, why couldn't he just be happy with that. There, the infamy stops. It's hard to like an album when the first lyrics you hear go something like: "I'm the first person, you're the second person, earlier today I was in the third person." Things do pick up slightly after the initial shock of them particular lines. The bag-pipes, and sitar make things interesting. The lyrics, however, are consistently daft, and annoying. The song-titles are weird for weirdness sake as is the music. Take for example "Infinite Cow" or "You Create the Reason." You can only wonder whether working with Beck entitles you to a record deal, because there's a severe shortage of talent and originality gone into this album. It's the kind of album where after one listen you consign it to the darkest corners of your record collection. It must be admitted though that after a couple of listens, things pick up, but only a bit. Increasingly, the songs become less annoying. Unfortunately not to the extent that they stop being annoying. The whole thing reeks of early Beck, especially the album "Stereopatic Soul Manure" an album which most people would like to forget about. Point of advice: If you're going to imitate, imitate something that was good in the first place. by Kenneth Foxe