Familiarity breeds… well, it breeds a mixed bag for two particular Gallaghers. It breeds reaction from the lowest common denominator, it breeds nostalgia, ticket sales and most importantly to them it breeds number ones. And then of course there’s also the contempt. So a no win situation then? Well, hell no! It’s all win, you must have read a paper recently; Oasis are back on top of the world, on top of the charts and selling tickets like you’ll get to meet Mr Wonka and share a chocolate-fudge spliff at the end of it all. They sound like Oasis again, in print, on record, back in the national conversation. And you have to admit ‘The Hindu Times’ did start it all off with a even-handed heaping of credibility and bluster. And naturally that starts off the record, seeing that there’s no reasonable doubt as to what you’ve found yourself listening.
So, you want to hear what you were expecting now then? Well no, it’s not all like that. Sorry. But you wanna hear something you weren’t expecting? It’s not as bad as that initially suggests, sometimes not at all. And then occasionally it is. So in a way nothing’s changed still, at all. It is better than ‘Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants’ that’s for sure, in that the direct-hit ratio’s drastically improved, but then how couldn’t it be when ‘Gas Panic’, ‘Fuckin In The Bushes’ and ‘Go Let It Out’ were carrying all the weight back then.
Maybe it’s a strengthened capability to manage who they are this time around, rather than relying on a fading knack to just write songs. There is a partially successful recapture of lost vim seeping through a lot on offer here, maybe all down to being a unit, as they do deserve to be. But is it just too much pretending? Noel knows the formula, sure, but is his eyesight good enough these days to check measurements and get it all cooking on the right heat?
For every ‘Hindu Times’ there is unfortunately a ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ or ‘Little By Little’ Dial-An-Anthem (the latter only saved by its great Ashcroft-esque “my god woke up on the wrong side of his bed” line). Easily one of the best songs here is the rumbling, snotty Gem Archer penned ‘Hung In A Bad Place’, with some killer pop repetition and a scuzzed up wig-out, the only track that could possibly live up to the wild and unfounded ‘Definitely Maybe’ comparisons. So what would Noel have done without the new blood (though you can safely skip right past Andy Bell’s lamentable 70s twiddle-fest ‘A Quick Peep’)? Or indeed his brother?
Liam’s three tracks sparkle with a noticeable hunger his older bro’s have arguably lost. The excellent psychedelic ‘Born On A Different Cloud’ is a more humble ‘All Around the World’, the honest and gentle ‘Songbird’ evokes ‘Half The World Away’, but strangely so much more hippie and ‘Better Man’ is ‘Come Together’ Beatles though does slip a little too far into rock fantasies. Still nothing new there mind. Other Noel penned tunes could be great, ‘Force Of Nature’ has a huge aspiring chorus fit for any waster (“I’m smoking all my stash, etc”), but otherwise sounds like a limp Paul Weller and ‘She Is Love’ is all a bit happy-clappy, blatantly lacking a brutal lead from Liam.
This does turn out to be possibly their best set of songs since the over-rated ‘…Morning Glory’, but they’re clouded overwhelmingly by a feeling that they’ve been assembled. You don’t get the feeling ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ was assembled. But still, yet again, for their small shuffle back in the direction of acceptability they earn an extension to their warranty.