The Tris McCall Report

British Inversion, July 11, 2002

Britain's Loss of World Hegemony, Vol. 258

When did the sun begin to set on the old Britpop Empire? Was it 1997, when perennial also-rans like Echobelly and the Boo Radleys started to have difficulty getting stateside releases? Or was it earlier still? If What's The Story (Morning Glory) was an apotheosis, a commercial and cultural high-water mark for the genre, it was also an indisputable victory in a feud between factions -- big sound and big sentiment trumped those groups who, taking their cues from Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife, preferred smaller-sounding, tightly-crafted presentations suggesting the Kinks and Syd Barrett as much as The Who and The Beatles. Never mind that Noel Gallagher was, upon close inspection, a master of the kind of particular scenario-writing that Blur generally gets credited for -- the popular perception of Oasis as grandiose universalists (and laddists) encouraged other groups to soften their edges, crank up the midrange, and turn their backs on traditional English irony and story-art in favor of huge, painfully sincere bitter-sweet symphonies. By 1998, three years after the coronation of Oasis and What's The Story (Morning Glory), Gallagher's epigones had run rampant, and what passed for Britpop was essentially indistinguishable from American folk-rock like Matchbox 20 or Third Eye Blind. And Americans, great patriots that we are, will always prefer to buy domestic.

These days, Noel Gallagher is just another guitar rocker with an impressive resume struggling for elbow room on American airwaves. But then Gallagher is no ordinary songwriter, and there are still many for whom the world stops at the release of a new Oasis album. When we last heard from him (unmediated by the Chemical Brothers), he'd tried to sneak the underdone Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants by us on the strength of a decent but all-too-familiar single. Those of us who weren't hypnotized by the guitar loops and mellotrons understood it for what it was -- a holding-pattern album rife with rehashes and rhyming couplets dopey enough to justify his completely undeserved reputation as an indifferent lyricist. Most of the original group had deserted him by that point, and while he still had his younger brother's indelible voice as a resource, he showed himself willing to waste it, singing far too many of the tracks himself. Worse yet, he allowed Liam to write and present a song -- the execrable and interminable "Little James," still, for my money, the single worst recording in the history of Britpop.

Stung by criticism that Oasis had degenerated into an undisciplined version of the Noel & Liam Show, the Gallaghers recruited Andy Bell (the talented Ride sideman, alas, not the synthpop hero of Erasure) and the protean Gem Archer, toured, toured some more, deposited themselves in the studio and attempted to smelt their massive egos into a tight and single-minded unit. See, Oasis fan, it says so right there on the back of your new CD -- look at the credits, and you'll see that Heathen Chemistry was produced by The Band. Presumably this does not mean Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson were involved, but instead it suggests something that heretofore nobody had suspected about Oasis -- since most assumed that the "group" was little more than a vehicle for Noel's trad-rock ideology and Liam's alternately snotty and heartrending performances.

So no matter what your previous opinion of Andy Bell and Gem Archer, you'd be well within your rights to be skeptical about this new, democratic Oasis, an Oasis that allowed only six of the songs on Heathen Chemistry to be Noel Gallagher originals. Of the other five (Yes, I'm intentionally omitting the "bonus" instrumental, a you-had-to-be-there jam session if ever I've heard one), one is by Bell, one by Archer, and, run for the hills!, a daunting three were written by Liam Gallagher. To spread the wealth and responsibility further, Noel Gallagher now sings more than ever, taking the lead on two lengthy and important tracks, hogging the chorus of the album's undeniable centerpiece, and interjecting his old-man-of-the-woods backups wherever he can shoehorn them into the massive mixes. Andy Bell's voice (or is that Archer's?) also gets a nifty foreground spot or two, and Liam gamely plows his way through Archer's clumsy verses. Has Oasis really been transformed into a collective, a big, happy, mutually supportive family? Has the old coot finally relinquished the steering wheel?

Well, no. Bell's contribution turns out to be a minute-long, vaguely Floydish instrumental, little more than a breather between two of the elder Gallagher's colossi. Gem Archer's "Hung In A Bad Place" will either be received as a breath of fresh air or completely atavistic, depending on whether or not you think that recreating the sound and feel of the more raucous tracks on Definitely Maybe is the way for Oasis to go (I don't), but is in any case an unimportant song bearing the burden of an awkward lyric. The three Liam Gallagher originals turn out to be neither disasters nor triumphs -- the most forgettable, "A Better Man," closes the album with a fizzle, but is serviceable enough as a smooth landing, and does contain a nifty guitar hook. The other two are surprisingly solid, particularly the brief "Songbird," which shares more than a title with Fleetwood Mac and allows the kid brother to indulge his semi-secret treacly side; it's fluff, but fun fluff. Liam's slow epic "Born On A Different Cloud" serves as the album's effective closer, but it essentially begins the zone-out portion of the listening experience -- you could spin Heathen Chemistry twenty times before you really accessed the two last tracks. This sequencing has been carefully designed to highlight Noel Gallagher's contributions, and the other members of The Band have written songs that serve not as filler, but as frames.

In or out of context, the six Noel Gallagher songs are great. Not immediate-great like Definitely Maybe or the finest parts of The Masterplan, not visionary-great like What's The Story (Morning Glory), not conceptually-great like the misunderstood Be Here Now, but still undeniably great, great with the mature assurance of the works of an articulate, proven songwriter in full blossom, miles beyond anything on Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants. Perhaps the lesson of Shoulder was that Gallagher ought never to force himself -- here's a writer who is at his best when addressing a specific problem or scenario, and hey, he simply might not have had any more than six of those in his dresser drawer this time out. When he does have something direct to sing about, he has always attacked the problem with a precise, economical address, heavy on memorable lines and couplets, and with nary a word wasted. Several of these new songs repeat verses, and many critics claim this as hanging evidence of Gallagher's laziness -- get in there and write a second verse, you mook! But that's to deny him his subtlety, and to ignore his accompanying penchant for slightly but meaningfully altering the choruses of those same songs as they proceed. It's an experimental trick, not a lazy one, and the seamlessness with which Gallagher disguises his experimentalism within the strict format of radio-friendly pop-rock songs has always been testament to his artistry.

"The Hindu Times" opens the album with a superpsychedelic riff, a verse melody borrowed from "All Right Now," and the sort of rafter-shaking chorus that has made Oasis world-famous. Liam's performance, as always, redeems his brother's manic urgency and recasts it as chummy ambition -- his read on the line "I can't sleep 'coz the world won't wait" sounds neither desperate nor coke-wired, but, rather, charged with infectious and optimistic energy. Noel takes the lead on "Force Of Nature," and inverts his brother's goodwill -- it's a break-up song, and Gallagher, who had on previous albums played the generous if rakish cad, delivers a broadside that's unprecedented in its viciousness: "you look like a faded picture/I see the cracks freezing on your skin" is a wicked sentiment for the redemptive author of "The Girl With The Dirty Shirt" to express (and perhaps even to the same girl!). Gallagher stomps his way petulantly through the choruses, mixing outrage, threats, and insults with prophetic suggestions of doom, spitting out the lyrics with venom and cold immediacy. The whole thing's a hoot, and it's about as incendiary a kiss-off as you could ever want. "Stop Crying Your Heart Out," the American single, flips the script and approaches the end of a relationship with hard-faced resignation, if not sympathy. "All of the stars/have faded away/just try not to worry," sings Liam, only later to revise it, with chilling effect, to "we're all of us stars/we're fading away." The stars fade again on "Little By Little," a mid-tempo rocker that begins with organ swells and a declaration of embattlement and ends amid a squall of guitar and a manifest existential crisis. In between lay three and a half minutes of some of the most perfect AOR ever committed to tape, simultaneously stately and exciting, enough to remind everybody from Richard Ashcroft to the Goo Goo Dolls to Radiohead who's boss when it comes to The Big Music. Noel Gallagher's lead vocal on the chorus is wholly convincing and impassioned; here, as elsewhere on Heathen Chemistry, the elder brother at last proves himself a worthy frontman (though, to be fair, still not half as good as Liam). The distance he's travelled since "Talk Tonight" and other Definitely Maybe B-sides is almost inestimable. "(Probably) All In The Mind" finds the brothers singing close harmony over Noel's eightieth iteration of "Tomorrow Never Knows"; unsurprisingly, it works yet again.

Gallagher closes his contribution to Heathen Chemistry with "She Is Love," an old-fashioned country hardball of a number, pastoral and hand-clapping, with a catchy melody, strummed acoustic guitars, sweet flutes on the mellotron, and a big singalong chorus. Though the subject is love rediscovered, and though it's placed at the end of the album to ameliorate the caustic effects of some of the previous pessimism, Noel's performance communicates an unmistakable and even somewhat noble weariness, love of a second order, cooler after a rainstorm. Previous Oasis albums have been so relentlessly upbeat and high-Romantic -- and The Band has been so consistent that (unlike many of their American counterparts) they're not in this to depress people or to reinforce or applaud anyone's misery -- that Gallagher no doubt surprised himself with the depths of the vitriol he needed to spew this time around. Oasis probably saw "She Is Love" as a good compensating measure, but, hey, they don't have to apologize to me. They caught a few bad breaks, the group essentially split up and needed to be reconstituted, the style of music they do isn't too popular anymore, they're never going to be all that big in the States, Paul McCartney dissed them, their marriages broke up messily in the British tabloids, New Labour turned out to look more or less the same as the Old Tories, Manchester United keeps on winning. Let them vent, it's okay, they've earned a gripe or two. Better an unedited document of disappointment and frustration like Heathen Chemistry than a please-everybody half-measure like Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants.

One last thing, and then I'm off to listen to the new Gomez album again. Ever since 1997, when Be Here Now mildly disappointed the faithful, there have been suggestions in both the British and American press that Oasis was poised to radically overhaul their sound by incorporating electronics. It would have been an easy step to take, and one that would, no doubt, have won them critical plaudits. Yet here they are, five years later, still riding the same concept, still mining the same classic-rock sources with impressive results, true to the original Britpop formula of traditional songcraft coupled with strong melody and broadly narrative lyrics. As for their contemporaries, Damon Albarn has reinvented himself as a cartoon shill for third-rate trip-hop, Ride, The London Suede, and Kula Shaker have dissolved, The Charlatans and Primal Scream seem content with their roles as proto-American funkmasters, Supergrass have stranded themselves in a netherland of sound, Louise Wener is writing books, Echobelly, Lush, Bond, and the Stone Roses are missing in action, Pulp is doing sea-shanties, Radiohead has lapsed into bloat and incomprehensibility, and God save us from whatever The Verve and Richard Ashcroft are currently doing. But Noel Gallagher soldiers on as if it's still 1994, and he continues to make music so compelling that its anachronisms barely even register for listeners. If, as an artist and craftsman, he was several strides ahead his peers eight years ago, by now he's lapped their asses three or four times.

 

Roll with it, take your time, say what you'll say, don't let anybody get in your way.