A Desert in the Oasis

Drums of Death - Noel Gallagher w/UNKLE & Mike D (mp3)
F**kin' in the Bushes (live) - Oasis (mp3)

Beady Eye. High Flying Birds. Whether these names mean anything to you depends on where Oasis falls in your musical universe.

When Oasis split up in 2009, the world yawned. Back in 1995, my longtime friend and music nut told me of his love for this supercool new band by describing them thusly, “They’re like the world’s greatest bar band... only with a massive Beatles fetish.”

“World’s Greatest Bar Band” isn’t the most original superlative, I’ll grant you. But if NRBQ and Southside Johnny can lay claim to such a title, I’m happy to give one of my votes to Oasis. I’ll bet Oasis blew the f**kin’ windows out of bars and stripped the paint off the walls in their early days.

The problem with even the best bar band, however, is that eventually it’s closing time, and Oasis kept playing even as the lights went up, the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and the manager swept up the floor and locked the doors.

The sibling drama between Liam and Noel Gallagher might have amused their fanatics -- it did a sublime job of inspiring a character in LOST -- and it certainly helped sell a few Brit tabloids, but for modest fans like myself, we didn’t give a flip. Make music and make it good, and whatever you do backstage to each other is beyond our fleeting prurient concerns. I’m more interested in what kind of stroller Jennifer Garner buys than I am about why the Gallagher brothers might be breaking bottles over one another’s skulls.

Reasonable minds can differ on exactly when the barlights went up on Oasis, but for me the answer is fairly easy: 1997. The following year, Oasis released The Masterplan, one of the greatest B-side compilations in rock history, which created the illusion of a band still overflowing with creative power. But they were already on the backslide.

Be Here Now, their third release, was less than highly regarded by critics. Not because the music was bad, but more because the Gallaghers didn’t know when the hell to stop a good song. Of the dozen songs on that album, only three dip below the 5-minute mark, and one of those is a 2-minute “reprise” of a 9-minute song. The other two under-5-minute songs clock in at 4:22 and 4:88.

Overlong songs are fine for a prog rock act like Rush, or for a jam band like Widespread Panic, but it’s deadly for a pop rock act or a bar band that idolizes the Beatles, a band who kept some ⅘ of their songs under the 3:00 mark and 95% under the 4:00 mark.

Had Oasis stopped drinking -- alcohol, and a little less from the cup of their own hype -- they could have cut this album down by 20 minutes and had a piece of pop rock art every bit as amazing and infectious as What’s the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe. Instead, you’re constantly pushing the NEXT button halfway through the song. Unless you’re drunk.

They lumbered through four more albums, each equipped with two or three catchy gems and a lot of forgettable crap, before Liam smashed Noel’s guitar backstage in The Moment That Killed Oasis for good in 2009. (Or at least until the 2015 “20th Anniversary of Morning Glory Reunion Tour.”)

In the past nine months, Oasis has emerged as a two-band Yin and Yang. Liam & most of the other Oasis band members formed Beady Eye and released Different Gear, Still Speeding last spring, and Noel and his High Flying Birds released their eponymous collection in late October.

And the truth of Oasis is in these two releases: Liam has the 'tude; Noel has the brilliance.

Liam was voted the greatest frontman in the history of rock by Q magazine (no, I’m not kidding) in 2010, besting all the names you, dear reader, immediately think of as the obvious choice for this title. While I won’t go as far as Q, I certainly appreciate the key factors that make Liam a helluva stage presence.

Different Gear... comes with plenty of self-confidence and moxie, but that’s about the alpha and omega of what’s good about it. Seriously, I can’t even remember the name of two songs, nor could I begin to hum the lyrics of a single Beady Eye tune. Until yesterday, I hadn’t listened to a single track on that album since the two weeks after I first bought it. Moxie is fun in the moment, but it’s the lipstick on the musical pig.

If High Flying Birds has a flaw, however, it’s the lack of lipstick. They’re the cute girl who could be a supermodel with a little bit of lighting and makeup.

Although neither brother was going to be immortalized for lyrical talents, Noel was definitely the more gifted lyricist, and he was also the one capable of injecting a diversely-inspired sonic assault that managed to wink lovingly to his Beatles while also stealing from hip-hop and electronica and numerous other styles. Noel is -- as most successful modern rock artists are -- a master thief who happily leaves his calling card on the table.

Listen to “Drums of Death,” one of the rockinest mostly-instrumentals ever to bleed out your ears. Listen to “F**Kin’ in the Bushes,” which is basically Noel telling everyone else in the band what to do. (Which, by the way, is exactly why they hated him, because he knows better than they do and probably wasn’t shy on reminding them of that fact.) With rock candy like this, who needs lyrics anyway? (Which probably annoyed the crap out of Liam, since nasally whiny vocals was basically all he brought to the table.)

If you’re not well-versed on the Oasis oeuvre and need a place to start, I recommend The Masterplan. If you want to start with their most recent best work, then you’re much better off starting with High Flying Birds and jumping straight back to Heathen Chemistry or even Morning Glory.

HFBirds, is IMO, the best non-B-side compilation album by a Gallagher in 14 years. If it just had a little more lipstick, it would be awesome. As it stands, it’s just really good.

Dead Sharks?

The Pixies--"Where Is My Mind?" (mp3)

I've seen two concerts this month, which means it was a pretty good month. I saw the Pixies in Knoxville and Los Lobos (or just the songwriters with bass and drums) in Chicago. I've become a pretty tough concert critic, so as you read the remarks that follow, remind yourself, first and foremost, how much I enjoyed the two shows.

Both concerts were, in a sense, career retrospectives. The Pixies played their classic album, Doolittle, as well as a before-and-after of obscure B-sides. Los Lobos (actually David Hidalgio and Louis Perez) talked about their songwriting and played a number of their well-known songs as well a number of "newly-discovered" songs that they had written about 20 years ago and that have recently been released as a CD.

I'm sure you see the pattern. In effect, the "fresh" material was that which had rarely, if ever, been heard before, and certainly not live, though it was in no way new material. It's a technique that older rockers are starting to use more and more in various contexts. Neil Young has done it with his Archives, Dylan with his Bootleg Series, Springsteen with his recent release of Darkness On The Edge Of Town plus unreleased songs from those recording sessions.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with the practice. It helps older artists stay on the radar in an increasingly-competitive musical environment and fans like me continue to clamor for songs from those days, so much so that I spent the better part of an afternoon a week or so ago converting old Springsteen performances from YouTube to mp3. I cherish those performances.

The problem comes, I think, when that is all that a band or an artist is doing. Dylan, Springsteen, and Young continue to record and release new material, and, regardless what you may think of some of those particulars, all are managing the twilight or near-twilight of their careers with grace, creativity, and energy. While I can't claim that any of their most recent releases blew me away, all three contained at least several songs that are worth repeated listenings and, in some cases, are top-notch.

The Pixies, however, don't have any new material. Since they reformed and began re-touring to fan and critical acclaim, they have not recorded and released new songs that give us a sense of where they are today. We only know that they can still play with tightness and skill, can still recreate their signature sound with what appear to be the same chops they had decades ago. Los Lobos I can't speak of with the same definitiveness. One of my favorite bands for decades, I lost track of them several CDs ago. Kiko was such a masterpiece to me, such a peak of their career, that I haven't checked in with them much since. What I do know is that their new material is old.

Woody Allen's script in Annie Hall talked of relationships as compared to sharks. As Allen's character tells Diane Keaton's character (Annie Hall),“A relationship is like a shark–it has to move forward or it dies. What we've got here is a dead shark.”

Is a band that doesn't have new material and doesn't seem to intend to ever have any a dead shark? Yes, I think it is. It is not moving forward.

I'm taking the liberty of bringing in two friend perspectives against their will. One friend acknowledges that the Pixies' tours over the past several years are a blatant, overt money grab, and he defends the idea based on the notion that the band never made any money the first time around and that they deserve to. The other friend, who sees every concert through the lense of a Bruce Springsteen show, thought that the Pixies played their show without joy. Though he postulated several theories for this, including a kind of 90's anti-rock concert concert ethic that the Pixies were undoubtedly a part of, he could not get past what he perceived as the band's indifference to their show and audience except on a proficient, workmanlike level (a charge he was unwilling to level at Dylan, who did the same thing).

I don't know who's right, and I must also mention that Los Lobos was the exact opposite: they went out of their way to engage their audience and the debt that the band owes the city of Chicago for over 30 years of continued support. They worked the crowd, paced the show beautifully, left us satisfied and grateful to have seen such a good show. Not unlike the Pixies.

So I return instead to a different fact, that neither band gave us anything new or recent. They worked nostalgia, they worked the past. And when I got home, something annoying about that surfaced.

Much ado about nothing? I mean, both bands played excellent shows that confirmed both their personal prowess and the strength of their best songs?

All I know is this. In 1974, I saw the Beach Boys do a reunion concert. Yes, in 1974, they were already in retrospective mode. The odd thing about the Boys was that they were still recording at that point, had lost Brian Wilson and perhaps another Wilson or two at that point, but they had new albums that they were still releasing full of new songs that they had written. In fact, one of their comeback hits, "Kokomo," wouldn't come out for several more years. The problem was, even though they were still alive in one sense, on stage they were pretending to be the band that had once been, not the band that was. It was an odd dichotomy. It was disconcerting, at least to me. It was weird enough that I can't really name any reunion shows that I've seen since then. Except the Pixies. And they were a new experience for me, since they didn't come on my radar until Frank Black's solo career.

I guess I'm with Woody on this one; I want that shark moving forward. Otherwise, what's the point?

NOTE: as this post was going to press, this writer discovered two interesting facts: 1) that the Pixies may indeed record new material and 2) that the Pixies have sold the above song to a commercial, its own kind of money grab.