Oasis

Be Here Now

Oasis gives birth to a monster

Review Score:

(6/10)
All of the swaggering guitar riffs, snarling vocals, and straight-ahead rock combo sounds stack up to lasting more than an hour and ten minutes on Be Here Now. So the fact that it did not live up to the previous album's success (Morning Glory) is little to no surprise. Most people just don't have the patience to endure long, loud jams. But if that kind of thing is down your alley, Be Here Now can be a minor treat.

Songs like All Around The World and Stand By Me do not help shorten the album very much. The former attempts to be the next Hey Jude with its endless three chord cycle paired up with "na-na-na" chanting and the latter just has a few verses too many. When I saw Oasis in concert, Stand By Me was the only song in the set plucked from Be Here Now. That's too bad, because it does not represent the album very well.

Be Here Now is at its best when it just rocks out with no nonsense. If you are from the Definitely Maybe camp, then you'll like My Big Mouth, It's Betting Better Man, I Hope I Think I Know, Girl In The Dirty Shirt, and the title track. Armed with guitars cranked to infinity, Oasis shoots and scores on these songs.

But with the success of Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger in the states, Noel Gallagher was most likely under the impression that he could make lightning strike twice in the same place. And here is where Be Here Now gets a little tripped-up. Don't Go Away is, without a doubt, Oasis' worst ballad and overall worst single. The lyrics are tripe and the music is derivative of Slide Away, minus all the guts.

Fade In/Out could have been a nasty, gritty little number, but it just drags on and on without ever really building to anything. It seems to serve only as an excuse to have Johnny Depp step in and play some guitar. The Noel-sung Magic Pie reaches for the sweeping epic approach, but falls short and lands in the area of repetition.

The core of Be Here Now is pretty much in its repetition. Never have I heard so many choruses cycled through as on this album, and the momentum is shifty: you don't know if the album is on an upswing or a downswing. Their best album it is not. But it's not terrible either.

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