Oasis - Definitely Maybe

Fri 10th Jun, 2005 in Music Reviews

To be really uncool about this I’ll start off by admitting that I actually just got this album a little while ago.  I am too young to remember much of anything about Oasis other than their highly-publicised self-immolation. While everyone subconsciously knows the words to Champagne Supernova and Wonderwall what seems to be more memorable is the ‘bigger than the Beatles’ comments and that horrible song Liam Gallagher wrote. But this debut album made its splash before all of that and has to stand on its own as one of the seminal albums of the 1990s.

In 1994, Oasis’s debut album managed to clean up the genre Brit Pop with Definitely Maybe. Written entirely by Noel Gallagher, these songs are the perfect soundtrack for those unenvious of kids and mortgages and instead fantasise about rock’n’roll lifestyles. In the 1990s they were dole-munchers, now they’re enrolled in Arts degrees; either way these songs are all filled with all Noel wanted to write about: shagging, taking drugs, and being in a band. 

The opening track, Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, is all about this, setting the theme for the whole album with its lyrics:

‘I live my life for the stars to shine and people say it’s just a waste of time
in my mind my dreams are real
tonight I’m a rock ‘n’ roll star’.  

The next two songs follow along the same theme: Shakermaker, apparently a childhood toy of Noel’s, starts with electric riffs and heavy drum beats and leads you into a psychedelic trip to reminiscent of the ‘60s you can practically see the tie dye. And Live Forever has got to be one of my favourite songs. Its vocal melodies are so catchy you’ll be singing it for the rest of the day.

Supersonic was the first single off the record. After trouble over finding the killer single someone told Noel Gallagher to just go ‘fookin’ write one’ and in half an hour it was written and recorded in the same day. Liam’s vocals in this and in most of the tracks feature the trademark English whine, which seems to involve elongating the last syllable of every fifth word to somehow makes them all rhyme. But in a good way.

Cigarettes and Alcohol, also a big single, starts with dirty guitar riffs and uses drum beats to build into a heavy guitar rock track about drinking and smoking, among other things. The lyrics don’t try to be metaphorical when they ask ‘is it worth the aggravation to find a job when there’s nothing worth livin’ for’ and is an appropriate anthem for living it up.

You can tell here that Noel loves his guitar with the solos in this album. While they’re all relatively simple and predictable, this also means they are also catchy, memorable, and easy to listen to. These solos combined with the repetitiveness of the verses and chorus means that all the songs run about five minutes long. Not exactly the pop-friendly 3 minutes and 33 seconds but these songs still follow a structure and you can hardly notice they’re so long, instead wondering why you’re running late for the bus.

This album tried to be a lot of things and sounds of the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones are obvious. The wonderful thing about this is all these influences are worn on the band’s sleeve. Not any member of the band has ever denied where their sounds come from, admitting where they grabbed all their melodies before giving them their individual trademark sound.

With every new album that Oasis release you read a slew of press from the Gallagher’s stating it’s going to be their best album since Definitely Maybe. Seems to me maybe (definitely hahaha) you could save the trouble and just listen to this one again.