The thing about Oasis albums is that they are generally - universally - shitty sounding. Lots of good songs, but lousy production. I first heard of Oasis when Definitely Maybe was released in 1994. That was, and still is, a great record. It was rough around the edges but it worked. Not a bad debut at all. In fact - excellent.
But the band never changed their approach to production and the records that followed all sound a little too jagged. And while Oasis does have a lot of great songs, they have a lot more filler. They are a burrito with too much rice.
That album was different. It showed a lot of promise and was stuffed with great tunes. Loud guitars, snarly vocals and a genuine fuck you attitude. By the time this one came out, in ’97, you’d think the band would have insisted on better production and become really focused on their craft. But they didn’t, and as a result this LP is - well, it's OK. But just OK. Actually, it mostly just sucks.
So I traded it in. Got $100. Gotta love those original, hard-to-find first pressings!
NME magazine once asked the following question: Oasis. Be Here Now. Was it really that bad? The consensus was, yep. It sure was.
The lead off track, D’You Know What I Mean? begins with a beating helicopter sound and lasts for almost eight fucking minutes. The previous album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, was such a success and spawned enough hits (and contained enough strings to mask the lousy production) that it seemed improper to not like its follow-up. Surely it would be at least as well-received, and Morning Glory - if nothing else - really was well-received!
The world was expecting a masterpiece next, which I think caused a lot of people to fall under the collective delusion that what was eventually delivered was a lot better than it really was. The emperor's new clothes, and that sort of thing. Oasis had money by now, which fuelled their arrogance and egos (and their taste for drugs and booze) and the result was a chaotic, trashy-sounding wreck of an album.
Noel Gallagher himself remembers it as “the sound of five men in the studio, on coke, not giving a fuck.” And that really is what it sounds like, and this is the point at which I just stopped giving a fuck about Oasis. They once had so much to offer, but this is where it officially stopped and nothing that came after it was much good, either.
Oasis are not a complex listening experience. They keep making the same album over and over, except it gets a little worse with each pass. Definitely Maybe was a killer record. Nothing else matters.
Lyrically - well, Oasis lyrics are dumb. They are more like place-holders than actual lyrics. It can be argued that Liam's snarly vocals almost save the songs despite the crappy lyrics, that the words don't matter as much as how they are delivered. Because Liam could sing the phone book and it wouldn't matter. But I have to wonder what he could have done with songs that actually meant something.
Maybe they should have stayed hungry a little longer. They are - could have been - better than this.
The thing about Oasis albums is that they are generally - universally - shitty sounding. Lots of good songs, but lousy production. I first heard of Oasis when Definitely Maybe was released in 1994. That was, and still is, a great record. It was rough around the edges but it worked. Not a bad debut at all. In fact - excellent.
But the band never changed their approach to production and the records that followed all sound a little too jagged. And while Oasis does have a lot of great songs, they have a lot more filler. They are a burrito with too much rice.
That album was different. It showed a lot of promise and was stuffed with great tunes. Loud guitars, snarly vocals and a genuine fuck you attitude. By the time this one came out, in ’97, you’d think the band would have insisted on better production and become really focused on their craft. But they didn’t, and as a result this LP is - well, it's OK. But just OK. Actually, it mostly just sucks.
So I traded it in. Got $100. Gotta love those original, hard-to-find first pressings!
NME magazine once asked the following question: Oasis. Be Here Now. Was it really that bad? The consensus was, yep. It sure was.
The lead off track, D’You Know What I Mean? begins with a beating helicopter sound and lasts for almost eight fucking minutes. The previous album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, was such a success and spawned enough hits (and contained enough strings to mask the lousy production) that it seemed improper to not like its follow-up. Surely it would be at least as well-received, and Morning Glory - if nothing else - really was well-received!
The world was expecting a masterpiece next, which I think caused a lot of people to fall under the collective delusion that what was eventually delivered was a lot better than it really was. The emperor's new clothes, and that sort of thing. Oasis had money by now, which fuelled their arrogance and egos (and their taste for drugs and booze) and the result was a chaotic, trashy-sounding wreck of an album.
Noel Gallagher himself remembers it as “the sound of five men in the studio, on coke, not giving a fuck.” And that really is what it sounds like, and this is the point at which I just stopped giving a fuck about Oasis. They once had so much to offer, but this is where it officially stopped and nothing that came after it was much good, either.
Oasis are not a complex listening experience. They keep making the same album over and over, except it gets a little worse with each pass. Definitely Maybe was a killer record. Nothing else matters.
Lyrically - well, Oasis lyrics are dumb. They are more like place-holders than actual lyrics. It can be argued that Liam's snarly vocals almost save the songs despite the crappy lyrics, that the words don't matter as much as how they are delivered. Because Liam could sing the phone book and it wouldn't matter. But I have to wonder what he could have done with songs that actually meant something.
Maybe they should have stayed hungry a little longer. They are - could have been - better than this.
Almost never was the hunger for a new album greater than the anticipation preceding this turd's release, and never was there a bigger disappointment. Oasis had birthed another album despite the odds being stacked hard against it, but it was an ugly child. The year before, Liam Gallagher had bailed on the band's MTV Unplugged performance and walked off an American tour because, he claimed, he needed to buy a house. Two months later the police arrested "an unkempt man" with a pocket full of cocaine, who turned out to be Liam.
The new record was up against the band's previous two efforts, which were both massive successes. Nineteen-ninety-four's Definitely Maybe and 1995’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory) were already considered classics, so expectations were huge. The pressure was definitely on. Journalists who were issued advance copies had to sign a contract stating, among other things, that they wouldn’t talk about the album while in bed with their partner. Even the record label's staff were forbidden from entering their offices at certain hours, lest they overhear the album and, I dunno, tape it or something.
Every major British news program sent a camera crew to regional record shops on the day the record was released, and record store HMV issued special certificates to first-day buyers. Reviewers, caught up in this hysteria, were tripping over themselves trying up-praise each other. “Oasis’ third LP is a veritable rock and roll monsoon of an album; a giant jigsaw puzzle, an elemental force, a monster that cannot and will not be contained,” claimed Vox. Q called it “cocaine set to music,” which, it turned out, was true.
Plainly put, it sounded like crap. It still does, despite several reissues that don't do much to fix things. The mixing is the problem. It's horrible and it's hard to correct. There's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig, and this was one fat porker. The shortest track is five minutes and 13 seconds, which is an eternity here. And the band is trying way too hard to be cool. The morse code blips in D’You Know What I Mean supposedly spell out “bugger all,” and a toilet flushes at the end of the title track - entirely appropriate, in my opinion.
So why bother reissuing a record that sounds so shitty, other than as a money grab for a band that is no longer earning all that much? Even the Gallagher brothers couldn't care less about it, so why should anybody else? There are two-and-a-half hours of bonus materials, but they're also shitty sounding. This album marks the beginning of the end for Oasis, who so wanted to be The Beatles but unlike them will be completely forgotten before too much longer. We'll still have Definitely, Maybe, but hopefully we won't remember the rest of it.
