Few albums can say that they have defined a generation, but (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is undoubtedly among that elite crowd. Recorded over the course of just 15 days in 1995, the album catapulted Oasis from crossover indie act to worldwide pop phenomenon, flooding the charts with retro-rock riffs and unforgettable hooks. To say that its impact was titanic would be an understatement. It became the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad. It has sold over 22 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. And it was the knockout blow in the battle of Britpop, being twice as successful as their rival Blur’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape.Following up from the incredibly popular Definitely Maybe was no mean feat, but Oasis pulled it off without a hitch. The idealistic hope-against-the-odds message from their beginnings was replaced with realism and reflection. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Noel Gallagher commented that while their first album “was all about dreaming of being a pop star in a band, the second album is about actually being a pop star in a band”. They had reached where they wanted to be, and were wondering what lay beyond fame and fortune. The Mancunians had clearly enjoyed enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to yield four sides of vinyl, though they never limited themselves purely to counter-culture clichés. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting took on a notably more introspective tone, nestled in amongst jauntier tracks like She’s Electric and Roll With It. His philosophising shone through perhaps most obviously on Cast No Shadow, a song which was dedicated to The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft and details the struggle that songwriters (and more universally, all of us) face when they desperately try to say the right thing and it keeps coming out wrong. Elsewhere, we find the attitude and aloofness that Oasis do so well. The cocaine anthem Morning Glory rides along a continuous wave of stadium-filling guitars as Liam Gallagher sings “All your dreams are made / When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. And then of course, there are Oasis’ biggest hits: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which urges the listener to live regret-free; Champagne Supernova, which despite its famously nonsensical lyrics (Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball we’re looking at you) resonates with people the world over; and the often-imitated-never-replicated Wonderwall, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any Brit who doesn’t know all the words. Being more than just wedding dancefloor fillers and karaoke classics, the three tracks brilliantly capture the band’s skill for drawing complexity from simplicity. Ultimately, this album marked the beginning of the long-drawn-out end for Oasis and the albums that followed never quite lived up to the glorious rock and carefree euphoria found here. But then that’s another story… © Abi Church/Qobuz

Twenty-six years after Oasis' 1996 two-night stint on the grounds of Hertfordshire's Knebworth House, their frontman, Liam Gallagher, achieved the same feat as a solo artist. This live album captures the best takes from his June 2022 Jubilee weekend dates at the same venue in front of 170,000 people. The set leans heavily on Oasis material but also features renditions of songs from his three U.K. number one solo studio albums.© James Wilkinson /TiVo

Few albums can say that they have defined a generation, but (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is undoubtedly among that elite crowd. Recorded over the course of just 15 days in 1995, the album catapulted Oasis from crossover indie act to worldwide pop phenomenon, flooding the charts with retro-rock riffs and unforgettable hooks. To say that its impact was titanic would be an understatement. It became the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad. It has sold over 22 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. And it was the knockout blow in the battle of Britpop, being twice as successful as their rival Blur’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape.Following up from the incredibly popular Definitely Maybe was no mean feat, but Oasis pulled it off without a hitch. The idealistic hope-against-the-odds message from their beginnings was replaced with realism and reflection. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Noel Gallagher commented that while their first album “was all about dreaming of being a pop star in a band, the second album is about actually being a pop star in a band”. They had reached where they wanted to be, and were wondering what lay beyond fame and fortune. The Mancunians had clearly enjoyed enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to yield four sides of vinyl, though they never limited themselves purely to counter-culture clichés. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting took on a notably more introspective tone, nestled in amongst jauntier tracks like She’s Electric and Roll With It. His philosophising shone through perhaps most obviously on Cast No Shadow, a song which was dedicated to The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft and details the struggle that songwriters (and more universally, all of us) face when they desperately try to say the right thing and it keeps coming out wrong. Elsewhere, we find the attitude and aloofness that Oasis do so well. The cocaine anthem Morning Glory rides along a continuous wave of stadium-filling guitars as Liam Gallagher sings “All your dreams are made / When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. And then of course, there are Oasis’ biggest hits: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which urges the listener to live regret-free; Champagne Supernova, which despite its famously nonsensical lyrics (Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball we’re looking at you) resonates with people the world over; and the often-imitated-never-replicated Wonderwall, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any Brit who doesn’t know all the words. Being more than just wedding dancefloor fillers and karaoke classics, the three tracks brilliantly capture the band’s skill for drawing complexity from simplicity. Ultimately, this album marked the beginning of the long-drawn-out end for Oasis and the albums that followed never quite lived up to the glorious rock and carefree euphoria found here. But then that’s another story… © Abi Church/Qobuz

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Like any Ryan Adams album, Love Is Hell comes with a back-story, one that is carefully calculated to construct the enfant terrible's self-myth. Love Is Hell was intended to be the official follow-up to 2001's Gold -- the album that was not a collection of demos (that was 2002's Demolition), or the recorded-but-shelved albums 48 Hours or The Suicide Handbook, or even his alleged song-by-song cover of the Strokes' Is This It. Longtime Smiths fan that he is, Adams teamed up with John Porter -- the man who produced The Smiths, Meat Is Murder, and part of The Queen Is Dead -- with the intention of creating his own mope-rock album, hence the title Love Is Hell. Americana label that it is, Lost Highway balked at releasing a stylized tribute to Mancunian rainy-day bedsit music and didn't release it, encouraging Adams to record a different album, presumably one more in line with the label's taste. In the press and on the web, our hero spread stories about how the label claimed it was "too depressing" and "dark," thereby cultivating the myth that he's a maverick genius, while the label cheerfully countered with the defense that it just knew that our boy could do better. Eventually, a compromise was arranged: Adams kicked out a new album, the self-descriptive Rock N Roll, while releasing the equally self-descriptive Love Is Hell as two EPs, the first hitting the streets the same day as the "official" album, the second arriving a month later. Five months after that, the full-length Love Is Hell, containing both EPs plus "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" from Rock N Roll, was released, negating the worth of the individual EPs (which were, after all, merely two halves of one album) and likely irritating legions of fans who bought both EPs.While it took longer than necessary to have the whole bloody affair of Love Is Hell released as its own entity, it's hard not to view it as a companion piece to Rock N Roll, particularly because they're two sides of the same coin. In effect, both Rock N Roll and Love Is Hell are tribute albums, each a conscious aping of a style and sound, both designed to showcase how versatile and masterful Adams is. But since he's a synthesist more than a stylist, Adams, for all his bluster, winds up as a Zelig-styled character, taking on the characteristics of the artists he's emulating -- something that can be sonically pleasurable, but far from being the substantive work of mad genius that he relentlessly sells himself as. If Love Is Hell has the edge over Rock N Roll, it's because it's more carefully considered in its production and writing, and he manages to hide his allusions better than he does on Rock, where every title and chord progression plays like an homage. Here, he shoots for the Smiths and winds up in Jeff Buckley territory tempered with a dash of Radiohead circa The Bends. To claim that it is a dark affair is to criticize its milieu more than its substance, because the songs have the form and feel of brooding, atmospheric mope-rock, not the blood and guts of the music. Adams is fairly adept at crafting that mood -- anybody who's such a fan of rock history should be -- sometimes relying more on a blend of attitude and atmosphere instead of songwriting. Such is the fate of a stylized tribute to a style with specific sonic attributes, but Adams also does come up with a clutch of effective songs: the epic sprawl of "Political Scientist," which captures him at his best Buckley; the title track, which is nearly anthemic with its ringing guitars; the understated "World War 24"; the gently propulsive "This House Is Not for Sale," which would fit nicely between a Julian Cope and Morrissey track on a college radio show from the late '80s. "English Girls Approximately" is an effective Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg fusion, and the closer, "Hotel Chelsea Nights," is one of his best songs, a mildly anthemic soulful anthem with vague overtones of "Purple Rain." Nevertheless, it's telling that the best song here is a cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall." It's a well-done cover but not much of a reinvention -- Adams uses Noel Gallagher's solo acoustic version of the song as a template, replacing strumming with fingerpicked guitars and altering the phrasing slightly -- which is why the song itself shines through so strongly: it resonates how the other songs are intended to, but don't. While it doesn't fatally hurt Love Is Hell, since it is an effective mood piece, it does undercut it, revealing how Adams delivers the sizzle but not the steak.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The first Beatle solo album -- as well as the first Apple album -- was a minor eruption of the pent-up energies of George Harrison, who was busy composing this offbeat score to the film Wonderwall as Magical Mystery Tour raced up the charts. With the subcontinental influence now firmly in the driver's seat, the score is mostly given over to the solemn, atmospheric drones of Indian music. Yet, as a whole, it's a fascinating if musically slender mishmash of sounds from East and West, everything casually juxtaposed or superimposed without a care in the world. Harrison himself does not appear as a player or singer; rather, he presides over the groups of Indian and British musicians, with half of the cues recorded in London, the other half in Bombay. The Indian tracks are professionally executed selections cut into film cue-sized bites, sometimes mixed up with a rock beat, never permitted to develop much. Touches of Harrison's whimsical side can be heard in the jaunty, honky tonk, tack piano-dominated "Drilling a Home" and happy-trails lope of "Cowboy Museum," as well as a title like "Wonderwall to Be Here." Occasionally, the overt footsteps of a Beatle can be heard: "Party Secombe" is a medium-tempo rock track that should remind the connoisseur of "Flying"; "Dream Scene" has Indian vocals moving back and forth between the loudspeakers over backwards electronic loops. As this and Harrison's second experimental release, Electronic Sound, undoubtedly proved, pigeonholing this Beatle was a dangerous thing.© Richard S. Ginell /TiVo

"Maybe your gonna be the one that saves me/and after all/you're my wonderwall." This stirring and eerily effective chorus gave Oasis the perfect means to strike a passionate chord with millions of listeners in 1995. Their first single released from their sophomore release What's the Story Morning Glory, "Wonderwall" emerged as a British rock anthem resonating with hope for the band's ever-expanding fan base. "Round Are Way" is a brilliantly strung melody with catchy guitar riffs by guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher, scintillating vocal presence by Liam Gallagher, and an intense cloud of breathless brass and harmonica work. The third track, "Swamp Song," is Oasis' sole instrumental piece, an intense four-minute block of sterling distortion-laden guitar and soaring harmonica chants by guest mate Paul Weller. The very ending is loud and raucous, a blend of heavy rock & roll noise that sincerely identifies the group's overconfident and reckless image at times. However, the band turns full circle during the final track, proving to their ever-observant critics and fans that they can create a highly imaginative tune, without revved up and excess wattage, but instead with a more solemn approach. The endearing and eloquently spun gem, "The Masterplan," is a tune packed with raw emotion, enlightening and thought-provoking lyrics, and an emotionally stirring string arrangement. Reaching a vitally high level in musicianship, "The Masterplan" helped the band discover an even broader interest group and is certainly one of Oasis' finest achievements. During the tour, the tune thrilled crowds and became a favorite and regular request, and though it was not released on Morning Glory, many reverent fans believed it should have been. A song about hope, the future, finding one's destiny, and a master plan is a heartfelt message that achieved a spiritually uplifting effect upon Oasis listeners. Due to sales distribution, this British import is relatively a rare find, and listeners should have greater luck finding "The Masterplan" as the final track on their long-play B-side album, self-entitled by the same name.© Shawn Haney /TiVo

A young Noel Gallagher at the height of Oasis' popularity in the mid-'90s declared that the band would not release a compilation CD until the end of their career, since such compilations implied that a band's career was indeed over. A decade later, an older, presumably wiser Gallagher realized that if you're about to leave your longtime label and that label will release a compilation whether you participate or not, it's better to write your own draft of your band's history than having the label do it for you. And so Gallagher designed the first Oasis hits compilation, 2006's double-disc, 18-track Stop the Clocks. As he so often has done in his career, he looked to the Beatles for guidance, choosing their two 1973 hits comps 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 -- better known as The Red Album and The Blue Album -- as a template for Stop the Clocks. Those records mixed up hits with album tracks and B-sides to offer an overview of the band's identity, and so it is with Oasis' double-disc set, as it overlooks big hits -- "Roll with It," "D'You Know What I Mean," "Stand by Me" -- in favor of things that were tucked away on albums or singles. Where the Beatles albums sampled more or less equally from each phase of their career, Gallagher is a bit more ruthless in rewriting his own history, thoroughly excising 1997's Be Here Now from the band's past -- an overreaction that's nevertheless perfectly in line with everything regarding their overblown third album.Such fits of pique are typical for Gallagher and Oasis -- which at the time of the release of Stop the Clocks had only his brother Liam as the other remaining original member -- and another is the exclusion of the non-LP Christmas 1994 single "Whatever," omitted presumably because if it were here the band would have to shell out royalties to Neil Innes. But even if "Whatever" is missed along with such other great singles both early ("Shakermaker") and late ("The Hindu Times"), Stop the Clocks works at its most basic level: it offers an excellent primer to Oasis at their best. Of course, this means that it draws very heavily on the glory days of 1994-1996, offering five tracks each from Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory, plus various B-sides from this era. All in all, a whopping 15 of the 19 tracks here date from this time, and the four songs that do come from the 21st century -- "Lyla," "The Importance of Being Idle," "Go Let It Out," "Songbird" -- more than hold their own since they rely on what has always been their strengths: sturdy classicist songwriting and spirited performances. And that's why Oasis' best music has dated very well: anything with such aspirations to be classic lives and dies by the strength of their material, and this manages to capture its time and transcend it, since its attitude remains potent, and the songs sound as good hundreds of times after their fist spin. No, even at two discs Stop the Clocks doesn't contain all of the best of Oasis, but it does contain Oasis at their best and enough of it that it can indeed be passed along to future generations as an introduction to one of the best bands of their time, just like how the Red and Blue albums converted many young listeners to the Beatles.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

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Fed up with the Gallagher brothers? Believe they long ago grew too big for their (Beatle) boots? Be that as it may, here's a pointed reminder of just why the siblings' heads and egos became so outsized. Familiar to Millions [Highlights] slims down the band's double-live CD Familiar to Millions to one disc, which also makes for a handy-dandy greatest-hits set. Recorded at London's Wembley Stadium across two nights at the end of their 2000 grand world tour, Oasis were more than at the top of their game, they were gods. The band sound omnipotent, and were met by a crowd of adoring worshippers whom they drove to a screaming frenzy. One of the many highlights of the show was a seething "Shakermaker," and behind the group you can hear the whole stadium singing along in ecstasy. For all the comparisons with the Fab Four (and on record there was no denying them), live the band brought a power to their music that even the Mop Tops at their early Hamburg heights could never equal. The thundering sound of "Who Feels Love" is a case in point, both brothers' emotive performances across "Gas Panic" is another, and when they burst into "Roll with It," Oasis would have brought the walls down if they'd been indoors. But it's the one, two, three sucker punches of "Wonderwall," a hard rocking "Cigarettes and Alcohol," and the wave your lighters in the air "Don't Look Back in Anger" that brings the entire arena to their feet. A strutting "Rock 'N' Roll Star" hauls the set to a suitable close with all the insouciance of the early Small Faces and bad boy attitude of the '60s Rolling Stones. If ever a band wanted to go out on a high, this was the chance; nothing Oasis have done before or since has equaled this show, and having heard the Highlights, you'd be a fool not to go and hear the entire set in all its glory.© Dave Thompson /TiVo

One part saccharine hyperbole, the other part subtle satire, Mr. Flowers is a Spinal Tap for the lounge set. I keep waiting, with each spin, for "A Groovy Place" to become a tired, one-play Weird Al novelty, but somehow its cheery, deadpan edge keeps it fresh as repeat-play background music. More obvious covers like "The In Crowd" and "Please Release Me" don't quite prepare you for cool, hilariously swingin' takes on Prince's "1999," the Doors' "Light My Fire" (on second, thought, there always was somewhat of an overwrought lounge undercurrent to that one) and a Velvet Underground medley laying the Vegas-lite treatment on "All Tomorrow's Parties," "Venus in Furs," and "White Light White Heat." Most endearing of all is the nerdy revision of the hit Oasis single "Wonderwall" (inexplicably mirroring the original's chart success in England). Camp originals include the title track ("A groovy place where we can sing and dance, enjoy an evening meal/Where you can be yourself and do just what you feel/Oh baby take my hand 'cause life can be unreal") and "Crusty Girl" ("I never thought that I would fall in love with a crusty girl like you/Living together in a little treehouse big enough for two"). This "groovy place" treehouse is home to light melodrama, bad hair-pieces, politely-twanged guitar, cheap strings, horns, organ and Latin percussion and, of course, the cheesiest backing vocals imaginable courtesy of the Sounds Superb Singers. More than a hip joke, the Mike Flowers Pops mixes the driest martini you're likely to experience all year.© Roch Parisien /TiVo