June 16, 2003 @ 9:00 pm

Oasis - Heathen Chemistry (EPIC)

Aidin Vaziri

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Since the 2000 release of Oasis’s last album, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher have lost all their original band members, watched their respective marriages fall apart, and teetered on the brink of dissolution. Thank God.

Since the 2000 release of Oasis’s last album, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher have lost all their original band members, watched their respective marriages fall apart, and teetered on the brink of dissolution. Thank God. If ever a band needed to be slapped out of its lazy stupor, it was Oasis. Heathen Chemistry, the British rock group’s fifth studio album, resurrects some of the power of its first, 1994’s seething Definitely Maybe. The new CD crackles with anger, energy, and defiance. Cuts like “The Hindu Times” and “Hung in a Bad Place” are three-and-a-half-minute blasts of melody and noise showing the mouthy, monobrowed siblings at their venomous best. “It’s all over town that the sun’s going down on the days of your easy life,” Noel sneers on the fang-baring “Force of Nature.” It’s a welcome change from the corpulent Giants, a largely shiftless pastiche of psychedel- ic riffing and sprawling arrangements. And while Chemistry is not a total return to ass-kicking form, the Gallaghers at least prove that when push comes to shove, they can still bring it on.

Article tags: Oasis, Heathen, Chemistry, EPIC 

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