Oasis, Time Flies… 1994-2009
Featured Album
An alternate view of the brief, tumultuous reign of the Brothers Gallagher
You might presume to know one, or all, of these songs. This is Oasis, after all, surely one of the most well beloved anthem-makers in the last 20 years of British rock, and this is their best-of. This must be time to hoist high a frothy tankard and join in a group sing-a-long.
Well, it is, and it isn't. The biggest hits are, of course, here, and there's still not a microsecond to "Wonderwall" or "Don't Look Back In Anger" or "Cigarettes and Alcohol" not worth hollering along with. But the 26-song Time Flies is more than a greatest-hits playlist. It's also an alternate view of the brief, tumultuous reign of the Brothers Gallagher. The conventional narrative — godlike rock stars, mountains of coke, epic psychosexual sibling rivalry, the Future of Britpop, "Blur Vs. Oasis," Patsy Kensit, massive unibrows — is a dizzy whirl of tabloid fun, and it will always be central to the Oasis Mythology. But, at a certain point, it slights the music — according to this narrative, Oasis effectively evaporated from the Earth after Be Here Now. But, as Time Flies ably demonstrates, the former Kings of Britpop kept making excellent music long after they had been deposed. This thoughtfully sequenced and, with one or two exceptions, end-to-end excellent retrospective is a welcome corrective, and it demonstrates the perils of living with swagger turned up to one hundred thousand million.
Time Flies comes kicking out of the gate with some of the brashest, four-chord stompers the band ever wrote: "Supersonic," "Roll With It," "Live Forever." This is time-immemorial Oasis, kicking ass and hocking gobs of spit into faces. Soon, though, the timeline splinters: "Wonderwall" is followed immediately by the genius power ballad "Stop Crying Your Heart Out," from 2000's Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. The song is a bracing reminder that Oasis didn't suddenly forget how to pen an indelible tune after 1997. "Songbird," from that same record, is a refreshingly slight two-minute country-pop breeze; it's sandwiched pointedly between "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Don't Look Back In Anger," two of their most immortal hits. Some of these juxtapositions don't work — no feat of sequencing could keep "The Hindu Times" from drag and bloat — but Time Flies rescues a number of late-period hits with its dredging net. "Let There Be Love," from 2005's Don't Believe the Truth, is gorgeous, lazy and understated; "The Importance of Being Idle" is an agreeable rewrite of the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon." 26 songs is, for most mortals, a fairly exhausting amount of Oasis, and Time Flies is best consumed in chunks. Still, in responsible doses, no rock band of the last 20 years could make you feel quite so vividly that you were, in fact, a fookin' star.
