The brains they had went to their heads.<\/p>\n
How do you follow up a multi-platinum masterpiece? The Beatles followed up Sgt. Pepper\u2019s <\/i>with the sprawling, flawed White Album<\/i>. Fleetwood Mac followed up Rumours <\/i>with the sprawling, flawed Tusk. <\/i>And Oasis, that most classicist of Britpop rock bands, followed up (What\u2019s The Story) Morning Glory <\/i>with the sprawling, flawed Be Here Now.<\/i><\/p>\n
Those first two follow-up records were double albums; this one is 71 minutes, close to double album length. It\u2019s as if the band feels they have free reign to say whatever they want and that every note of it should be captured on vinyl. For a band with rampant egos such as Oasis, one can only imagine the spectacle and grandeur with which they would present their next slice of music\u2026and Be Here Now <\/i>does not disappoint on that level.<\/p>\n
Four of the 12 songs here are around seven minutes long, one is nine minutes long and the rest are close to four or five minutes each, save for the closing instrumental coda. The music is blown up larger than life, with piles of instruments (guitars mostly), extended jams and long intros\/outros that bloat this way beyond what it needs to be. Yet the hubris on display is exactly why people like Oasis in the first place, in essence making Be Here Now <\/i>more of the same, albeit inflated to cartoon proportions.<\/p>\n
\u201cD\u2019You Know What I Mean\u201d starts things off with an airplane drone that crashes into the song, a swirling epic that is more about the production than the actual songwriting. Still, it sounds so good \u2013 and Liam Gallagher\u2019s voice is as fine as ever \u2013 that it doesn\u2019t really matter. As a leadoff single from the album, it was about as ballsy as one could get (7:41? Really?), but it\u2019s pure Oasis.<\/p>\n
Much of the swagger of this album comes from the band actually being the best instead of aspiring to be, the way they did on Definitely Maybe<\/i>, so there\u2019s a sense of invulnerability that pervades the music. Something like \u201cMy Big Mouth\u201d would have fit in on that debut; here, it is given wall-to-wall guitar overdubs and played with absolute mid-tempo confidence. Actually, a lot of the songs are like that around the middle of the album, but none are truly memorable in the way the best early Oasis could be.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t Go Away\u201d is one of the better songs, a relatively scaled back slower piece with some of Liam\u2019s best singing to date and one that points the way the band\u2019s music would eventually take from Heathen Chemistry <\/i>onward. <\/p>\n
The album closes with two <\/i>epics this time around. The first is \u201cAll Around The World,\u201d which starts slowly and continues to add on layers of sound (guitars, strings, brass Liam\u2019s increasingly higher voice) for nine minutes, creating a soaring effect that sounds wonderful, even if it doesn\u2019t have much to say or fails to create a mood the way \u201cChampagne Supernova\u201d did. <\/p>\n
It would have been a fine album closer, but the seven minute \u201cIt\u2019s Getting Better (Man!!)\u201d gets that honor. Instead of a slow build, this one starts off loud and refuses to relent, even though it stays pretty safely hidden behind a wall of guitars the entire time. A change of dynamics would have helped, or some more chords, or maybe cutting out a couple of minutes and moving it up in the track listing.<\/p>\n
The main problem with Be Here Now <\/i>is not that it\u2019s too much of a good thing, but that it\u2019s similar to an Easter egg in that the delicious chocolate shell opens up to reveal a hollow inner core. Oasis didn\u2019t have a lot of songwriting to do, so they instead piled on the sound to make what little they had sound good. It succeeds, but it leaves you feeling empty, and that ultimately keeps this from being the classic it so badly wants to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":31134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6400],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-42820","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-oasis","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42820"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}