What with the current UK tour, and Oasis in the news, why not a hot take?

“Everybody” knows that Be Here Now is a bad album. Right? I certainly don’t think so. In fact, it’s my second favorite album, behind Definitely Maybe. Yes, it’s loud, messy and overblown, but that’s the great thing about it. I love every song on it. “Magic Pie” took more than a few listens for me to warm up, but even it eventually won me over. I’d say it’s a perfect album it all it’s extravagant, messy, imperfect glory.

That’s considered a hot take.

An even hotter take? (What’s the Story) Morning Glory is severely overrated. Of the 12 tracks, 2 are instrumental snippets. I never really cared for “The Swamp Song “in its full-length, and pulling 40 second snippets of it really doesn’t help things. “Hey Now!” and “Roll With It” are pretty bad, especially the former. “Cast No Shadow” is pretty mid. Yeah, I know it’s meaningful to a lot of people, but I never liked it.

The problem is that the Morning Glory era of the band has many of its best b-sides. If you took those 5 songs out, and replaced them with “Round Are Way,” “The Masterplan,” “Talk Tonight,” “Acquiesce,” and “Step Out” (lawsuit be damned), the album would have truly been one of the best album of the 90s and all-time. If you couldn’t convince the lawyers on the last one, “Underneath the Sky” would do pretty darn well too.

I’ll go on to say that the band’s later discography is good, but not great. Losing Bonehead hurt a lot. Noel dismissed his firing as “It’s not like Paul McCartney leaving the fucking Beatles.” Maybe not, but it certainly changed the chemistry of the band. I understand WHY he was fired (Noel didn’t want any drinking the studio because he and Liam were trying to go sober), but it changed things a lot. Losing Owen Morris, likewise.

At the time of its released, I hated Standing On the Shoulder of Giants, but time has mellowed my opinion. It’s a really good album with a few gems (“Gas Panic!” for example is in my top 10 Oasis tracks), but having one of the Spice Girls’s producer producing Oasis was a bizarre choice at the time and I’ve not mellowed on that opinion. And probably won’t any time soon.