Oasis

Be Here Now

You see me...

Review Score:

(10/10)
This album is loud and bombastic--this is the album Oasis was bound to make.

Even though Noel Gallagher himself hates this album, I think it's an absolutely essential work. It is heavily underrated and has become the goat in Oasis' catalogue. Funny, I don't remember it being ripped apart completely in the press, yet it is considered the album that irrevocably changed the band and was met with a bit of a backlash after the massive success of the first two LPs. Be Here Now also appeared the same summer as Radiohead's OK Computer, and much critical focus shifted from these mad Mancunians to the whiny electronic-fused rock of Thom Yorke and Co.

The same way Rattle & Hum is considered the album that humbled U2 (another bit of completely farcical music press nonsense), this is the album that forced change in Oasis.

Yet this is a great album. The wall of sound is massive and dense, packed with fat hooks and the heavy production that Oasis was heading toward.

Noel claims that this album was created with a liberal helping of drink and drugs. I'm not surprised, but since when have these vices stopped great albums from being made?

The opening track was the first single and is rock-solid and rousing. The opening features some electronic, static and sample filled noodling before introducing a big fat beat and a great chorus.

So many of the criticisms of this album are true, and yet, I find myself loving the album even more all these years later because of those very perceived flaws.

Magic Pie, for instance, is a massive, head-nodding track that goes on about two or three minutes longer than you ever think it will, but that big heavy end jam makes the song for me and gives it an almost irresistible weight. There are at least three loud and heavy rockers: My Big Mouth, I Hope, I Think, I Know, and It's Gettin' Better (Man!) They also have big fat hooks and choruses, and the numerous guitars are embedded in a swirling wall of sound, the drums sometimes muddied in the background but definitely there. Strange that none of these got singles releases. The biggest single off the album, and the only song Oasis revisit live anymore, is Stand By Me, an excellent stadium anthem.

The weakest track is probably Fade In Out, featuring Johnny Depp on guitar(!) It's a bit flat. Don't Go Away is similar to Stand By Me, another great, swaying track, a bit melancholy, released as a single in some countries.

I think this is the inevitable Oasis album; it's where they were going, and the album they had to make in order to move on and change. Like their first two albums, it's very consistent in its sound and vision, more so than the two followups. While Radiohead went on to become the darlings of (largely useless) music critics, Oasis stomped right on. Highly recommended!

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