The Pop Corporation

Everyone’s an Oasis fan these days, now they’ve got back together and either reminded people with greying sides of the summers of their youth, or indeed, giving the young ‘ins a chance to see what the Gallagher brothers are like on stage.

Of course, not literally everybody is an Oasis fan and – this writer included – never really liked them despite understanding the appeal and all the reference points.

Anyway you cut it though, the sheer force of nature that is Oasis is undeniable. There’s a magic that happens when the two brothers take to the stage, which we’ve seen before with siblings in The Stooges, The Kinks, The Beach Boys and so on and so on.

So, if the Gallaghers can cash-in on this, so will we. We will go back through each Oasis album and see how they stand-up. Has time mellowed us? What were they doing? Are there any surprises?

Let’s find out and start at the start.

DEFINITELY MAYBE

One of the fastest selling debuts, blah blah blah. The first Oasis albums barely needs any introduction. Written in flats around Manchester, on the dole, dreaming of something bigger, young bucks kicking the middle classes in the ’90s indie up the backside, ‘Definitely Maybe’ was clearly a tonic that everyone needed.

Oasis were, for a period, everyone’s bit of rough. Kicking off with perhaps Oasis’ greatest song, ‘Rock N Roll Star’ is Oasis in microcosm. As opening gambits go, “I live my life in the city, there’s no easy way out – the day’s moving just too fast for me” is pretty great. In ‘Live Forever’, Oasis brought back the mid-tempo indie disco snogger, and ‘Slide Away’ is obviously an all-timer.

Elsewhere, what’s interesting is you find ‘Up In The Sky’ really squarely aiming at a ’66/’67 English psych, and it’s pretty convincing before giving away to an indie-by-numbers chorus drop. What is so remarkable at how light Liam’s voice sounds in place. That falsetto? It was always going to be killed off by Benson & Hedges, getting the bags in, and yelling into the late nights.

What is obvious though, is that throughout the album, you can hear the echoes of shoegaze, which is not something you’d associate with a bunch of put-your-dukes-up lads from Burnage. As shoegaze made way for grunge, then it makes sense that Oasis’ need for volume and wall-of-sound guitars, is that it owes a debt to both of those scenes, and simply added more hooks and choruses, and bingo! You’ve got some hits on your hands.

You can’t really feel the troublemakers that made all those headlines in the music itself, save from ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’, because largely, they’re being very sweet. Must have been Manchester’s predilection for delicious ecstasy tablets, or something. ‘Shakemaker’ still plods like it always did, and ‘Columbia’ drags like a snake’s dick, but it’s clearly got something. ‘Bring It On Down’ is about the closest the group get to the spit ‘n’ snarl of The Stooges and proper attitude, so you’d hope they’ve got that in their reunion setlist.

It might be the only bazillion selling album that has a song about lasagne on it, but who would actually fact-check a thing like that? And we don’t care if it’s a fan-fave or not, ‘Slide Away’ should have closed the album out, but a daft acoustic song.

Local bylaws state that is absolutely mandatory to mention the b-sides from this period, and just how much everyone liked the b-sides.

WHAT’S THE STORY MORNING GLORY

The elephant in the room with this album is just how much money Oasis made for convicted pedophile Gary Glitter with their track, ‘Hello’. However, when you listen to it and imagine them opening up their comeback gigs with it, what else are they going to do? It’s certainly better than the now quite lumpy ‘Roll With It’. It’s a shame that the Battle Of Britpop was contested by two of the lamest offerings from ’90s indie’s two great singles bands. Ho hum.

‘Wonderwall’ however, is one such track that absolutely deserves its place in the annals of indie pop. Sure, it’s annoyingly overplayed and brought out by every cunt in shades with an acoustic guitar at a house party, but Liam does a career best vocal and those cellos are a nod to baroque pop and it just sounds like a classic. It deserves its place much more than ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, because it starts off with the ‘Imagine’ piano and sure, it’s turned itself into an anthem in Manchester after the terror attacks at the Ariana Grande arena show, so we won’t go too hard… but… y’know…

‘Some Might Say’ sounds like Oasis to the power of ten, and there’s no-one else can make songs like that, and it just sounds like people in Adidas sambas slowly jumping up-and-down on the spot, so y’know, let it be what it is. ‘She’s Electric’ is absolutely Oasis’ ‘Ob La Di’, and the less said about it the better. ‘Cast No Shadow’ meanwhile, shows the softer side of the group, and it’s quite nice. The title track is a big slab of classic rock, and ‘Champagne Supernova’ (along with Blur’s ‘This Is A Low’ and Dodgy’s ‘Grassman’) is the final piece in the holy trinity of Do A Slowish One With A Big Instrumental Outro As Your Last Song On The Album AKA Almost All Of Embrace and Starsailor’s Back Catalogue.

This album is ‘Definitely Maybe’ part two, and it y’know, you can see why they’re both considered classics.

BE HERE NOW

This is where things start getting a bit wonky right? The coke bloat has set in, and the songs are getting longer, right? Well, if you listen to ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’, the verses with their Morse Code and whatnot, are frankly, pretty boring – but that chorus? Classic Oasis, innit? The words mean nothing, but they sound enough like a rallying cry that, while you’re a bag and eight Stellas deep, it’ll mean the world to you.

Elsewhere, ‘Magic Pie’, ‘I Hope I Think I Know’, ‘My Big Mouth’, ‘It’s Getting Better Man’ are a case study in turning the volume up too much, so instead of beating you up, leaving your breathless and euphoric, it actually sounds a bit like you’re listening to someone trying to have a conversation with you while they’ve got a hairdryer on. It’s all very average, but listen very carefully and you’ll hear the faint sound of an Oasis devotee telling you that actually, it’s the best album they did for some reason or other.

‘All Around The World’ and ‘Stand By Me’ may be fan favourites for all we know, but they’re blunt tools. Blunt tools that sold a gazillion records, obviously. But on this album, it sounds like Noel tried to up the psychedelic drone and really push for rock music to start giving in to LSD instead of coke, but sadly, it feels like the latter won out.

STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF GIANTS

The album kicks off with, of all things, a sampled breakbeat, a Zep-ish riff, and a sample from the Isle of Wight festival. ‘Fucking In The Bushes’ actually sounds quite good in 2025, and has the prog drone that you heard in the immense ‘Forever’ by The Charlatans – both of these things, clearly indebted to the likes of Deep Purple.

What else is going on here then? Well, kinda gone is the lout on a night out rock, and they’ve fully committed to Mojo Magazine, Sundazed reissues psych, and honestly, on the face of it, it is admirable that they’re trying to stretch the Oasis sound. ‘Who Feels Love?’ is the Gallaghers imagining they’ve been to Rishikesh, and it’s a bit meandering and long, but it’s okay. It’s better than Kula Shaker, if that counts for anything.

However, there’s no getting around ‘Little James’ which sings, deadpan, “have you ever played with plasticine – even tried a trampoline?”, which is piss-funny. It’s Liam’s first attempt at writing a song, and you can tell. He wrote it for his son or something, so whatever. ‘Sunday Morning Call’ is a Noel one, and while he sounds absolutely worn out on it, it’s got enough twists and turns in it to make you think he was actively trying to write more song in his songs. It’s alright.

It’s a departure. Good for them. You can’t be churning out the same stuff over and over. New producer, terrible album cover, and got its name from the edge of a £2 coin, only written down wrong. What are they like, eh?

FAMILIAR TO MILLIONS

It’s a live album.

HEATHEN CHEMISTRY

Reading the title ‘The Hindu Times’, you worry it’s going to be one of the worst things you’ve heard in your life, but actually, it’s got a fidgety little psychedelic guitar motif, and Liam’s voice doesn’t sound completely shot to shit, and it’s got that Classic Rock chug that – can you believe it? – sounds pretty great. Is this considered one of the great Oasis singles? Maybe it should be, especially compared to the frankly manipulative ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ which sounds like something written with one eye on being in montages for stuff to make men with hearts of stone cry into their microwave curries.

A surprise on this is ‘A Quick Peep’, which sounds like folk-prog. It’s an interlude, but imagine sticking a psychedelic Irish reel on an album for a fanbase that might normally take the piss out of such a thing. That gives way to ‘She Is Love’ which sounds dangerously close to marital contentment, which is always bad news for a band of bad lads. Still, at least it gave Oasis fans something to have played at their weddings.

‘Little By Little’ is the big single off this, and honestly, there’s sections of it which sound decent, but it’s that forced-anthemic stuff that grinds our gears. Maybe that’s on us, and it’s almost certainly a fan-favourite. We’re not going to check the numbers on this. We’re writing these things down as we think about them, without cheating.

The whole sound of the album feels like a band reaching a natural end. Some of it sounds like a goodbye, even though there’s more LPs to come. There’s a sense of resignation to it all. Maybe they’d been on the road too much and needed a holiday, recording some solo stuff, rather than riding it ’til the wheels fell off. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but in places, the psychedelia they’ve moved to, sounds weary and bruised.

DON’T BELIEVE THE TRUTH

In ‘Lyla’, you’ve got part two of ‘The Hindu Times’. It almost sounds like Oasis, by this point, are the only big-ticket group trying to keep psychedelic rock’s flame alive. Brian Jonestown Massacre might take umbrage with that, but then, BJM weren’t filling football stadiums on their own, were they?

‘The Importance of Being Idle’ is the most forwardly ’60s psych record Oasis ever cut to wax. Indebted to The Kinks (which is clearly no bad thing), it’s a freakbeat cut that sounds like Noel really sat down with this song, and properly finished. One thing we haven’t mentioned is that, as the years went by, Noel clearly grows in confidence as a performer and, on ‘…Idle’, he’s never sounded so vocally confident. It’s a good single.

The album is very production-forward, which makes sense as they had loads of money to spend by this point. They were still having chart-toppers, because when were they not? And how about this for a take? This is one of the more complete Oasis albums. It sounds like a proper band all chipping in, though we can’t confirm that – what makes us say that, is that there’s bits of it that remind you of Ride’s very under appreciated ‘Carnival of Light’ album. If there’s a reappraisal due by people who like Oasis more than us, this album should be the one that features surprisingly high on the list. If the first two albums are an immovable Top Two, this is third. It might be our favourite, because we don’t have all that baggage of people with something invested in it.

DIG OUT YOUR SOUL

Weirdly, we’re looking down the barrel of another Oasis LP that is surprisingly half-decent. More bluesy, more beaten up, there’s tracks on this that, if we heard them performed by someone else, we might have given them more of a chance.

‘The Turning’ is a good slab of gothic, Southern rock. Can’t quite believe we just wrote that sentence and decided to keep it in the edit. ‘To Be Where There’s Life’ reminds us of Primal Scream’s ‘Vanishing Point’, and we like that one. Basically, all the Oasis-By-Numbers songs on this is where it feels doughy, but the other bits – they’re interesting and clearly show that Noel was still using his millions in the bank to get himself down the record shop.

It’s beefier in places, and kinda predates the ‘AM’ album by Arctic Monkeys. Sludgy riffs and all that rockstar stuff. If the group were ever (unfairly) dismissed as a pub rock band (what’s wrong with being a pub rock band?), this album felt like they were in the mood to throw everything at it. Sadly, it’s in this period that Liam throws something at Noel’s head, and he says “fuck this”, and everyone has to wait until 2025 to see them together again. Peggy, their ma, must be thrilled.

And given that this is the last album before everyone fell out with each other, before everyone had to put their bucket hats into semi-retirement, there’s parts of it that really feel like it. The last song is called ‘Soldier On’ fercryinoutloud.

WHAT ABOUT THE B-SIDES AND THE MASTERPLAN?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Rockin’ Chair’ is a good one. We remember everyone liking ‘Acquiesce’ and saying it should have been a single. Look, we didn’t listen to them because they’re not proper albums and you need to learn the difference between an album and a compilation.

We’ve been having this comp/proper album argument with Americans on the Beatles subreddit, re: ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ for years now, and we’re not going to start having it with you now.