Continued from part I.
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000)
Things went rapidly south after Be Here Now. The Biggest Band In The World tried to counteract the cocaine-fuelled bloat and go with a more “stripped down” sound, but the result doesn’t suit them; the lack of fuzzy feedback and megalomania merely lays bare the disconcerting paucity of songwriting ideas. The anodyne pre-album single “Go Let It Out” sounds like a ChatGPT-essayed Oasis song; “Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is” and “I Can See a Liar” are desperately insipid; while Liam was inadvisedly let out of his playpen for the afternoon, given some crayons, and allowed to write what a sympathetic special needs teacher might describe as “lyrics” for “Little James.” There are some standout moments – the bitter and fittingly titled “Where Did It All Go Wrong?”, the swirling psychedelica of “Sunday Morning Call”, and especially the anguished “Gas Panic!” – but, on the whole, the air of decline is tangible.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “Gas Panic!”
Heathen Chemistry (2002)
Rock bottom is finally arrived at here. Standing on the Shoulder was an obvious misstep, while the records after this were merely pedestrian. But Heathen Chemistry is an abominable attempt to channel the ghosts of Morning Glory and reclaim the crown, long after the Fates had switched their loyalties to the fat dancer from Take That. The result is the meat-and-potatoes rock’n’roll drudgery of songs like “Hung in a Bad Place” and “All in the Mind”, plus the occasional sugary pop-rock ballad that sounds like it was written by Ronan Keating. In an unlikely twist, it’s Liam who comes closest to delivering the goods, on the eerie and downcast “Born On A Different Cloud”, while “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” benefited from David Seaman’s colossal ineptitude almost as much as Ronaldinho did. But other than that, Heathen Chemistry is mere self-cannibalisation, cynically packaged at the time as a “return to form” by giddy music journalists.
Rating: * *
Standout track: “Born on a Different Cloud”
Don’t Believe the Truth (2005)
This is the first Oasis album that I didn’t buy at the time of its release and never listened to from start to finish until recently – a common experience in the unscientific straw poll I conducted amongst my music-loving friends, and possibly indicative of the extent to which post-2000 Oasis gradually evolved into a tragic nostalgia act, limping abjectly around the British music scene like an old donkey long after the rest of the Britpop circus had packed up and gone home. Don’t Believe the Truth is not as cataclysmic as its predecessor but, in some ways, it’s actually more objectionable; competent, unembarrassing, but shockingly uninspired. The macabre and Dickensian “Importance of Being Idle” hints at a possible interesting direction for the band, if they hadn’t been so wedded to the legacy of the 90s, and the jangly “Turn up the Sun” is, I suppose, a passable enough opener. But other than that: yawn.
Rating: * *
Standout track: “The Importance of Being Idle”
Dig Out Your Soul (2008)
Oasis’ final studio album unexpectedly threatens to provide a worthy sendoff, mainly by jettisoning, at long last, the facile pub rock euphoria of Britpop, and by more fully exploring the melodic miserabilism hinted at on songs like “Gas Panic!” and “Importance of Being Idle.” In short, it sounds a bit like the Doves. Opener “Bag It Up” is gleefully cantankerous, “The Turning” moody and unsettling, and for the first time since Be Here Now, they actually nail the singles, with the barrelling neo-psychedelica of “Shock of the Lightning”, the Beatlesophilic balladry of “I’m Outta Time”, and above all, the crashing despair of “Falling Down,” which was Oasis’s last single, and a striking contrast to the swaggering self-assurance of “Supersonic”, their first. As ever, there’s an unfortunate excess of doomy mid-tempo rock’n’roll filler, but the standout tracks are some of the band’s best in a decade.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “Falling Down”
Overall ranking
1. Definitely Maybe (* * * * *)
2. The Masterplan (* * * *)
3. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (* * * *)
4. Be Here Now (* * *)
5. Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (* * *)
6. Dig Out Your Soul (* * *)
7. Don’t Believe The Truth (* *)
8. Heathen Chemistry (* *)
Selected Playlist
1. Rock’n’Roll Star
2. Live Forever
3. Morning Glory
4. Don’t Look Back in Anger
5. Supersonic
6. D’You Know What I Mean?
7. The Importance of Being Idle
8. Gas Panic!
9. Falling Down
10. The Masterplan