Your music's shite it keeps me Polling all night: OASIS (ILM artist poll 78) --- Voting open until Sunday August 21, 2016

As a kid, I didn't know what the phrase "one in the oven" meant, so I thought the song was saying that she's burning on of her dozen cousins in the oven and the lead singer doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

aaaahahahahahhaha

I thought it was "She's got one in the other," a very odd way of describing an incestual relationship among the cousins.

Was surprised to learn that neither Gallagher bro is on the cover of Morning Glory

― Οὖτις, Sunday, August 7, 2016 2:15 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Producer Owen Morris is on there, holding the master tapes of the album, but he's not one of the two guys in the foreground.

It's hard to choose a favourite of all the sleeves that Microdot/Brian Cannon did for Oasis, and I always liked how all the single and album sleeves had a visual continuity to them, which was lost when they stopped using him after the Be Here Now era... I guess it helps to distinguish the good Oasis releases from the shit ones, though.

Yes, they were very well served by their graphics. Hard to imagine their brand being well served by a more rudimentary / d i y style.

Suede had (still have) a similar continuity to their artwork.
Blur, too, had those distinctive Stylorouge sleeves, but stopped using 'em after Blur

the popmatters oasis b-sides list is topped by the two b-sides to "the hindu times." i was like, "can they really be that good?" and the answer is "yeah they're pretty nice!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atWQMzDerA4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbL-zl0s6-k

I'm not a fan of either, fwiw... for different reasons.

jesus magic pie is fucking cat

cat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMXQqoHAWmo

cat = catastrophic

it's great though

I broke out my singles and see that I have 17 of them.

Stop crying... was the last one I bought.

Re: Turrican's points on Beatles-yness - I dunno, I think it's a pretty big part of their thing, even on the first few albums. (Later, it's just oozing out of things like "Just Getting Older," which I'm now listening to for the first time - I mean, that drum fill at 1:17 even.) Obviously there are all the obvious things - "it's all too much for me to take," "in my yellow submarine," the "Imagine" lift on DLBIA, the titles of "Wonderwall" and Be Here Now, "tomorrow never knows..." etc. I don't find most of these distracting but it is an unusual density of references to one specific band.

But I think it's there in aspects of their sound - especially the backing vocals early on. Those big "aaahhhhhhs" on "Supersonic" and "Shakermaker" are super-Beatlesy to me. There's other bits and pieces that you could have swapped onto an Elephant 6 record without anybody noticing. "Up In The Sky" is louder and fuzzier than anything the Beatles would have done, but at its core, built around that wiry mod riff, it's a "Paperback Writer" kind of thing.

Brimstead is right that the glasses and shag haircuts also played a role though. For a minute when I first found out about them I convinced myself they had to sound something like Elton John, based on seeing my mom's copy of this around the house:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41DJJ8BD1PL.jpg

Yeah, could insert that into an Oasis lineup and nobody'd be any the wiser..

I always felt that the criticisms of Oasis "ripping off The Beatles", on the whole, were overstated, particularly on the first three albums.

"ripping off" =/= "being influenced by"

Loads of bands were influenced by The Beatles, including Oasis, and most of 'em didn't cop the level of flak that Oasis got for having a Beatles influence either. Yes, I do think it's there in the sound of the early albums, but people bang on about it as if Oasis were copping entire Beatles songs and passing them off as their own, which is why I say the criticisms are overstated.

Apart from a few seconds at the end of 'She's Electric' and the intro to 'Don't Look Back In Anger' (which was put in deliberately and doesn't repeat anywhere else in the song) and the piccolo trumpets on 'All Around The World (Reprise)', I can't think of much that's a direct lift... and those things always came across as "tributes" to me, anyway. All the other references are lyrical, or in the titles.

I always felt that Noel's real musical passion was for early '70s glam rock, hence the blatant steals from T-Rex and Glitter and why their version of 'Cum On Feel The Noize' is the most convincing cover version they ever did.

totally agree - their sound is way more Chinnichap than the Beatles.

although you left out one direct lift (the horn line in "Round Are Way" = the horn line from "Good Day Sunshine")

er Got to get you into my life? one of those

Blatant lifts from: Orange Crush, Waiting for the man, Uptight, How sweet to be an idiot, and so on.

unfamiliar with those entries in the Beatles catalog

Oh, and the end of "With a little help from my friends" went into "She's electric", there I filled it in.

Xpost yeh, what I'm saying is that the Beatles were an influence, but direct lifts mostly came from other places. Like, hundreds. OK, maybe not hundreds, but.

Finished my BHN and Standing... re-listens while cleaning the house today. Sadly they're both a little worse than I remembered - BHN kind of in exactly the ways I'd remembered, but so much more of it. In particular, "It's Getting Better (Man!!)" is probably going to drop off my ballot; it's got a great hook and some really energetic playing, but it's seven minutes long and I don't think it introduces one actually new element after the three-minute mark. Maybe there's an extra backing vocal with Noel going "Yeahhh!" or something but that's really it. "All Around The World" bears the brunt of the criticism of the excess but idk, I might keep that one in my list since it sort of stands in for this whole enterprise while being slightly hookier. "Be Here Now" is okay but again - does this kind of lightweight "silly song" need to be the kind of thing where a whole verse repeats just to make space between guitar breaks? "Magic Pie" is indeed dire though less irritating somehow just because it's at least more sonically different from the rest of the album. In general I don't much enjoy Noel in ballad mode ("Talk Tonight" is one of my least favorite cuts from the 'classic' period) and this, again, doesn't have enough to say to justify its length.

Standing on the other hand is a little more varied than I remember, and refreshingly cleaned-up versus the simmering dross of BHN, but the average song quality is lower if anything. The tracks I liked in 2000 I still like, even if "Go Let It Out" wears its influences a little too cheekily (and "Who Feels Love," actually a pretty good tune, wears them so hard it seems like the kind of thing they should have given away, Lennon/McCartney-style, to Kula Shaker). The appropriately-titled "Where Did It All Go Wrong" is a true generic rock mediocrity. "Sunday Morning Call" and "Little James" are awful - much, much more boring than I remember. I think I must have just gotten in the habit of skipping them every time. Basically, if you trim it down, there's an EP's worth of competent material that you could have swapped onto Be Here Now to improve it considerably. In fact, I'm just now realizing that I made exactly that mix CD, sharpie-labeled Be On The Shoulder of Giants (ugh).... though it didn't get too many spins as later that year I went off to college, discovered indie rock, and never looked back.

But in the spirit of the poll I will say that "Go Let It Out," "Who Feels Love?" "Gas Panic!" "I Can See A Liar" and "Roll It Over" are all, tbh, pretty decent even if none of them seem like all-time Oasis classics, and only the last, by running back to "Champagne Supernova," seems like an Oasis song.

Now back for another pass through The Masterplan. God, "Going Nowhere"! Amazing. Like Belle & Sebastian if they'd been a completely different band. If you put this and "Supersonic" side by side you have almost everything that's actually special about Oasis, certainly almost everything I want out of them. And yeah I don't think I've raved about "Supersonic" yet on this thread but boy is it awesome, it keeps getting stuck in my head but it's really fun, so forceful, so pleased with its own juvenile aggression and rock machismo. It sells the hell out of lines that on a later album would just sit there calling attention to their own dumbness (doctor / helicopter rhyme in particular) and then others are kind of perfectly dumb, as carried by Liam's echoed sneer. The second verse is probably the best line delivery of his career, and then yeah, those great background vocals... great fucking song.

whoah never listened to that before, I guess they did have good songs after 1996..?!

What, The Masterplan? Oh, it's essential listening! There's a strong case for just calling it the third album since it's basically all B-sides from the DM and Morning Glory eras. It's sort of glaringly missing "Round Are Way," "Cloudburst," "It's Better People," "D'yer Wanna Be A Spaceman," and probably some other good stuff, but it's a lot of canonical Oasis stuff and a bunch of ballot contenders for me - the aforementioned "Going Nowhere," "Underneath the Sky," "Fade Away," and "Listen Up" are all top-drawer.

oh wait you said you were voting for a bunch of B-sides, sorry if I misread you there!

yeah I never got the Masterplan because I already had bought all the singles and didn't think the Be Here Now b-sides would be much cop

Ahhhhh gotcha gotcha. Wiki reports that "Going Nowhere" was written in 1990, which makes sense for its desperate aspirational quality, and the fact that it's miles better than the A-side "Stand By Me." The only other BHN b-side on that comp is "Stay Young" which is much more like a Be Here Now track if a bit better than a lot of those.

I'm kinda rummaging through the other BHN b-sides now. The "Heroes" cover is almost exactly what you'd expect; like most straightforward rock band covers of the song it misses some of the strength of the original by turning it into a really heroic anthem, but as far as that goes it's better than the Wallflowers/Godzilla version from the same year. "Street Fighting Man" is kinda pointless but it sounds good. Has that funny thing about covers that remind me of weaker karaoke singers, where something that's slurred and unintelligible in the original gets carefully enunciated as if someone's working from the lyric sheet. I bet they sounded fucking massive doing this live though - a better classic-rock pick for their guitar-wall approach than "I Am The Walrus," that's for sure.

the other bhn b-sides are all pretty good but i've got a lot of affection for "my sister lover," which is kind of a weird jaunty shoegaze track

apparently noel liked it too bc he basically rewrote it as "dream on" for the high flying birds

might as well embed it, it rocks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WC4aY3Hb0Y

I'm really fond of 'Angel Child', myself... which is actually one of the Mustique demos!

i listened to heathen chemistry today and while it's better than standing it's still super dull

which is why I guess the opening few tracks of dont believe the truth actually sound legit awesome. "turn up the sun" is andy bell's faceless oasis rocker but it has such a pretty outro, "mucky fingers" is noel doing a velvets/dylan pastiche and he kind of sounds like he's having a blast not writing a typical noel oasis song, and I completely forgot that I actually like "lyla"

Its a halfway decent album, just to prove it can happen.

wow zak starkey really kicked this band in the ass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUSiclkjjtw

Golden Brown, texture like sun...

Don't Believe The Truth was an improvement on the previous two, but still nowhere up there with the Creation-era stuff. I've never liked 'Turn Up The Sun', 'Keep The Dream Alive', 'A Bell Will Ring', 'The Meaning of Soul', 'Mucky Fingers' or even 'Lyla'...

lol I love "lyla" so much rn

I remember hearing it when it came out and it was like "oh, that melody again..."

the bonus track from don't believe the truth is AWESOME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lBp5bExsEE

Cool sound to that! Not at all what I expect from Oasis. Kinda, idk, Velvets-y? Would prefer it with a full vocal - it's not quite interesting enough to keep me hanging on as that riff chugs along, but it's a cool direction for them to take.

It makes me wanna sing Pulp's 'I'm a Man' over the top of it.

dig out your soul i think suggests that they were about to become an interesting band again, in a different way from their creation records, but then ofc noel left

First listen to Heathen Chemistry. Always dug "The Hindu Times," still do, though after all that time spent in BHN-land I'm kinda trained to notice the exact moment when a song presses its luck one too many times on another go-round of the chorus. But at least it's got some oomph to it. In general the sound of this record feels like a nice correction from the overstuffed BHN and the basically muted and studio-based SOTSOG - they sound like a band again, even if Liam's vocals feel sorta pasted-in on e.g. "Hung in a Bad Place." The songs are back to reasonable lengths but still have things going on in them in terms of arrangement/performance; they're not just trusting the guitar solos to carry them. "Better Man," smartly, tries to close things not with an epic statement but a dirty rocker: heads up folks, this is an Oasis ready to play smokey, dangerous basement clubs (not that that will ever happen again). (This is one of several things about this record that reminds me in a weird way of R.E.M.'s later, better Accelerate.) That said, it's more of an attitude than a song - note the reliance on "All right now, yeah yeah" segments and the repetition of the title line while the band just kinda plugs away. Why they bothered with the hidden track I can't guess - it just cancels out the choice to end with "Better Man" and instead goes with a plodding jam that if it were in the middle of the album would be an obvious slab of momentum-killing filler.

Unfortunately the writing's not super consistent; Noel still hasn't refilled his bag of hooks after the flood of '94-'96. "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is very weak in this sense - just riding the chorus over and over, and the rest is sorta by-the-numbers - but at least it sounds great. A passable answer to Coldplay and Travis. The Kula-Shakery psych pastiche is still lurking in there, particularly strong on "(Probably) All in the Mind," but it's handled with those mid-period Beatles gloves again (I mean, this is basically "Rain," right?), which makes it feel much more natural a fit for the band. "She Is Love" is in the same boat, but a pleasant surprise - an old-school urgently-strummed Noel tune with some nice coloring from the added instruments and production touches. Spritely. "Born On A Different Cloud" goes instead for Imagine (I mean, this is basically "How Do You Sleep," right?) with the plodding piano and vague bitterness (and then fake George Harrison for the solo!). Really muddled lyrics though - the first track that really wears by the time it's over.

Overall the record is a kind of thing I don't really consume anymore - midtempo, middle-of-the-road guitar rock, another platter of workaday songs for the drive home and larded up with Sixties flavor 'cause that's when rawk was great, mannn. I know it has a really low reputation with the fans, and I guess it doesn't really add much to the Oasis canon, but it goes by pleasantly and doesn't overstay its welcome. Even stuff like "A Quick Peep" which would feel like the twentieth pointless cherry added to Be Here Now here feels just kinda like Noel and company having fun playing their instruments while waiting for Liam to show up. But if this had come out in 2000 instead of SOTSOG I would have given it enough spins to really get attached to some of these tracks.

Realized yesterday while scrubbing the shower that my relationship with Oasis is really similar to my relationship with the Foo Fighters - came in through the second album, got into the first (later deciding it was the best and the only real start-to-finish keeper), sadly got off the train right around the third, partly because of the aforemntioned college/indie-rock discovery... and then they meanwhile kept putting out albums, occasionally surprising me with an MOR single that sounded good to my ears, but never taking me to the point of actually buying a new album by them. They both went pretty quickly from a sort of scrappy, urgent creative spark to feeling like huge institutional dinosaurs, one foot already in the Hall of Fame and with nothing much to say. Doesn't mean the albums from that period are necessarily shitty though.

"the turning and "shock of the lightning" sound so cool, which isn't something i thought them capable of at this point in their discography

oooh i really like that "part of the queue" song. nice find, brad. yeah insane drumming