"(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" is rock and roll stripped down worse than a porn star at prom. It's in your face and blurry, a collection of sounds and rhythms so rapidly spit, they knock you in your face, breathless en route to a jazzed up headache. And I’m loving every minute of it.
The disk has songs that cry out to you - "Don't Look Back In Anger" - tunes that ride a high - "Roll With It" - as well as a merge of the most influential genres music chucked out since it was a toddler in Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel".
Oasis, rolling through the high stylings of MOD, their resemblance uncanny with folded shirts and a soul made out of rubber, release a dance pop riot, and make it fight tediously with sore throat grunge. Call them slaves to the Beatles, even back ally copy cats of the great Brit-pop movement, but do so with hypocrisy. Oasis have attached themselves to music that fought against the administration. They’ve recreated the Summer of Love, and I say, here, here to such a concept. With "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", Oasis have created a pot smoking disco ball, with Noel Gallagher blending in styles so different they blush when together.
When Noel sat down and wrote it, he may not have been thinking about the impact it was going to have in the ’95, "how badly can I slit my wrist" society. He may not have thought his cough ups about pop culture hysterectomies would matter. How wrong he was, because Oasis didn’t just define a decade, it nailed it down with a hammer, taking the living breath out of the mainstream sounds of grunge. Irony intended every bit.
Liam Gallagher, with light headed vocals galore, keeps an attitude about him that is rough and innocent, his voice flustering as he ponders to either hit the notes, or let the notes hit him first. By the time he gets to "Champaign Supernova", you find yourself pondering how you are able to dance to edgy, raw sound. Yet you do eventually. Emotions are chopped up and delivered in liquor shots as "Morning Glory" rolls through "Wonderwall", "Some Might Say" and "Hey Now!"
It's an album that doesn't beg to be recited. It doesn't want you to classify it, and in no way does it want to be put up on a pedestal. It's just a wicked nice piece of non fiction, from a band that seemed to carry the world on their British backs during its release.
There are some rock and roll discs that hold on to listeners through lowly punch lines, between a muddled mess of off beats and boring tunes. "Morning Glory" is all a muddled mess, but the hottest sounding and looking mess on the shelves of HMV.
And this dirty mess infects the listener with tunes that seem to come out of the planet..
Oasis performs "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" like it is a show on Broadway, because after the first track, every other has a life of its own. The actors, each taking on a personality for the play, hurry throughout the acts, picking away at the un-expecting audience with the dirty-pretty rock.
Oasis is not standing out in the rain, asking to be Shakespearean. Most of the rock and roll on the market – oh, pardon me, most of the “rock” on the market – is rubbish, over hyped, “next big thing” retaliation to our society’s need for Glamour and People’s magazines. There is nothing glamorous about Liam singing about booze, Noel bopping his head in tune and Paul Arthurs, Paul McGuigan and Alan White rocking out to the steady passed rock. Here’s to raw sound.
