(What's The Story) Morning Glory?

Today's Music That Is Pretty Great is (What's The Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis. This is an album that I listened to a little bit as a youth, then ignored and largely forgot about (if not spurned due to all the 'New Beatles' crap that surrounded Oasis for a while) then rediscovered, sort of, later in life. It's a good thing, too, because this is really a great album.

I'd love to talk about this album and its place in musical history - it happened at a curious time, just after grunge but before the popular music scene splintered into rap-metal and teen-pop and mall-punk and some equally horrible faux-genres. The album also received plenty of hype from the British press, and was well received here in the states as well. Maybe it was the hangover from Kurt Cobain's death and Pearl Jam sort of falling out of the public eye, gangsta rap being a little too dangerous for the entire nation to accept, and the media's consequent search for a new musical messiah that led Oasis to be so big for a couple years. At least until it became apparent that the Gallagher brothers were a couple dysfunctional drunks. Consequently this album is sort of frozen in a period of time where a lot of music junkies weren't sure where their next fix was coming from.

But history aside, this is a marvelous rock album. The singer, whichever Gallagher it was (I hope not the fruit-smasher [sorry]) has a good rock voice, plenty of range and just raspy enough to hold an edge. The guitar is good, and this band manages to incorporate strings - strings! - into the music without having them make any songs overly cute or cloying. The album really has a good balance of laid-back songs with loud rock tracks; I wouldn't call any of it 'metal' but the guitar, sounding like the Edge if he was younger and slightly ragged, runs the show here. The songs, you probably know a few of them by heart, are sequenced marvelously. "Wonderwall" is great, I personally like "Some Might Say" and "Morning Glory". And, of course, "Champagne Supernova" is just about the best way to close an album short of "A Day in the Life" that I could imagine.

Maybe Oasis didn't turn out to be the new Beatles, but for a while there, in the mid-90's, they really had us all worked up. Lightning in a bottle, I guess.

In other news:
There's a baby crying somewhere in the hall, the sun is here if only for now, and I could use a week of Saturdays.