Oasis: Lord Don't Slow Me Down (Liam Vocal Version)

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
[Band Myspace]
[Band Wiki]
[NME Story on the New Leaked Tracks]

Oasis: Stand by Me

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
[Band Myspace]
[Band Wiki]

Oasis: The Hindu Times

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
[Band Myspace]
[Band Wiki]

"This is What Liam's Kid Should Be Like"

Listen to "Cigarettes and Alcohol" by Oasis:

[Download the MP3 Here]
(Thanks Phil)

The Dead Flowers Best of Britpop Mix

Let's face it: any jerk can put some Pulp and Elastica on a CD and call it a Britpop mix. The recent Brit Box? Good intentions, but kind of boring. In the end, only one person could put you inside the head of a University of Michigan sophomore studying abroad in London in '96. Only one person could pick the music that would evoke day trips to Manchester on Smiths pilgrimages, or evenings spent sipping Newcastle and watching the band whose first release just got Melody Maker's "Single of the Week". That person is Dead Flowers' resident Britpop expert, Phil. For a year I've been pestering him to put together a mix like this, and he's finally delivered. Here's a track-by-track rundown:

1. Echobelly - Insomniac
Phil's Comment: Sept. 1994, Echobelly and Oasis both sell out the same venue, same capacity on different days in ny (wetlands). alas, quite different paths after that.


2. Gene - London, Can You Wait?
P: Never given their due/respect!
Mike (Dead Flowers)'s comment: I agree. Taken in small doses, Gene were quite good.

3. Blur - Chemical World
M: One of my favorite Blur tracks. Amazing guitar, and the lyrics would set the template for Britpop songs to come.


4. Oasis - Whatever
M: There's nothing better than a great non-album single. Sure, this apes The Beatles, but it does it in a classy way. Liam's voice would never sound better.


5. Suede - We are the Pigs
P: Best song intro in the britpop era.
M: While most latter-period Britpop bands would draw on mundane events like soccer championships and elections to find inspiration for their anthems, Suede had it right from the beginning: bad drugs and JG Ballard novels.

6. Tricky - brand new you're retro
P: I guess some trip-hop needs to be thrown in.
M: Sure, it sounds really dated. But it's interesting to hear what passed for 'cutting-edge' back then.

7. Salad - Granite Statue
P: Even the lesser players at the time were still quality
M: At first I thought this song was crap, but I've had it stuck in my head for the past few days and I can assure you it's top-notch. The girl can't sing, but only half of the Britpop singers could anyways.

8. The Auteurs - Lenny Valentino
P: Also criminally underrated, Luke Haines' post-auteurs stuff was never topped.
M: Haines really looks like Paul Banks in this video. Brilliant track.


9. Morrissey - Hated for Loving
P: Still the godfather of british pop

10. Marion - Time
P: Obligatory Manchester-based, smiths-heirs-to-the-throne-but-never-were band.

11. Sultans of Ping - Where's me Jumper?
P: The unofficial anthem of britpop.. bar-none
M: I think Art Brut heard these guys.


[Download The Dead Flowers Best of Britpop Mix]
[Use Winrar to unpack the file]

Listen to "We are the Pigs" by Suede:

[Download the MP3 Here]

Severed Alliances

Here's a good piece from the Guardian about musical partnerships:

The announcement last week that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had decided to reform Led Zeppelin for One Night Only, despite years of simmering resentment and the suggestion that hell would have to freeze over before they once more bestrode the stage like corkscrew-haired colossi, got me wondering: is rock'n'roll really just a history of men's love affairs with their other halves - their male partners in the band? And, without those love-hate relationships and the desire, in US shrink parlance, to complete unfinished emotional business, would rock'n'roll have ever sounded the same?

Most of the biggest bands ever have been dependent on a co-dependency, the sort that makes the most dysfunctional marriage look healthy and sane. From the hyphenated to the ampersandy, there have been Page and Plant, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Morrissey/Marr, Strummer/Jones and Wilson/Love... Think of a great band and it usually contains two warring partners who might otherwise, at least if Freud had his way, be copulating wildly on the studio floor; think of an all-time classic rock song and it's more likely than not the result of friction between two rampaging egos who are secretly vying for each other's love.

And it's still going on: in the 90s, Suede's Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler loathed each other with a vengeance, publicly so, making their recent reunion all the more weird ("Actually, not that weird." - Anderson and Butler's accountants), while Carl Barat and Pete Doherty's entire output as the Libertines would appear to be based on unresolved issues between them, blurring the line between creative and sexual tension. The rivalry that seems to spur on the Gallagher brothers is, of course, something else entirely, but even there the conflict between two artistic (term used advisedly) individuals would appear to be the motor driving the band.

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "Europe is Our Playground" by Suede:

[Download the MP3 Here]

From the Vaults:Thoughts on Oasis' Definitely Maybe

(Originally posted on Glamorama, 5.15.2003)

When Oasis arrived in a flurry of arrogance, punch-ups and general rock n’ roll debauchery, their musical merits often went unnoticed. Sure, people made lazy comparisons to The Beatles, but at least with "Definitely Maybe", that was only part of the story. Oasis’ debut album, recorded for the most part live,is bursting with noise, attitude, and most importantly, tunes.

"Columbia" achieves in 6 minutes what Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have yet to do with their whole career. "Cigarettes and Alcohol" is a ballsy ode to being on the dole: "Is it worth the aggravation? To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?"

Listen to "Columbia":

[Download the MP3 Here]

"Definitely Maybe" opens with the classic wish-fulfillment anthem "Rock N’ Roll Star". With its pummeling drums, scorching guitars, and Liam’s youthful, sneering voice—it’s clear that with all that arrogance came genuine ability.

The album’s highlights are numerous, but in the end one has to single out "Slide Away" as Noel’s crowning achievement. It’s a noisy ballad that at the same time is sweeter than anything Noel’s written since. As Liam wails "Now that you're mine, I'll find a way, of chasing the sun," one can’t help but appreciate the tremendous balancing act Oasis was capable of back then: a truly unusual blend of sentimentality and tough-guy bravado.

Noel Gallagher summed it up when he admitted later on: ‘People don’t make albums like this anymore, least of all me.’ As far as debut rock albums go, it received very little serious competition until The Strokes released "Is This It" some 7 years later.

Despite a plethora of other discs, "Definitely Maybe" stands as the crowning achievement of the Britpop era. Noel wanted his band to sound like John Lennon fronting The Stooges…and on "Definitely Maybe" he pulled it off with flying colors. Listening to it now, more than a decade after its release, it’s clear that not only can it stand side-by-side with all the new guitar bands, but indeed, it quite literally blows them away. Oasis may have since lost the plot, but this album made them giants on whose shoulder (sic) future bands will stand.

Listen to "Slide Away":

[Download the MP3 Here]

[Band Website]
[Band Myspace]

Paul Weller, Graham Coxon, Zak Starkey & Mani: This Old Town (Live on Jonathan Ross)

Seven Ages of Rock: British Indie

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Part V:

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Part VIII:

Part IX:

This One Goes Up to 11

The Times (UK) reports on music so loud it's sickening:

Dad was right all along – rock music really is getting louder and now recording experts have warned that the sound of chart-topping albums is making listeners feel sick.

That distortion effect running through your Oasis album is not entirely the Gallagher brothers’ invention. Record companies are using digital technology to turn the volume on CDs up to “11”.

Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars.

Britain’s leading studio engineers are starting a campaign against a widespread technique that removes the dynamic range of a recording, making everything sound “loud”.

“Peak limiting” squeezes the sound range to one level, removing the peaks and troughs that would normally separate a quieter verse from a pumping chorus.

The process takes place at mastering, the final stage before a track is prepared for release. In the days of vinyl, the needle would jump out of the groove if a track was too loud.

But today musical details, including vocals and snare drums, are lost in the blare and many CD players respond to the frequency challenge by adding a buzzing, distorted sound to tracks.

Oasis started the loudness war and recent albums by Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen have pushed the loudness needle further into the red.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, branded “unlistenable” by studio experts, is the subject of an online petition calling for it to be “remastered” without its harsh, compressed sound.

Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”

Mr Mew, who joined Abbey Road in 1965 and mastered David Bowie’s classic 1970s albums, warned that modern albums now induced nausea.

(Link from SCYHO)

Mortgage Rock

Alexis Petridis writes in the Guardian:

What has been the predominant musical sound during Tony Blair's premiership? You might disagree, but I'd plump for what one critic recently dubbed mortgage rock: the portentous, wistful, stadium-filling, ballad-heavy, post-Britpop genre that gets played in the background when an English team gets knocked out of an international sporting tournament, or an unsuccessful X-Factor hopeful collapses weeping into the arms of Kate Thornton. In fairness, it wasn't really around when Blair took office, although the records that influenced it were: Wonderwall, OK Computer, The Drugs Don't Work. For the entirety of this decade it's been, for better or worse, the sine qua non of British rock: you would think the record-buying public would be sick of it by now, seven years after Coldplay's debut, but no. They keep buying it: it was Snow Patrol, not the Arctic Monkeys, who made the best-selling album of last year.

What does its predominance tell you about the Blair years? You could argue that it's rock music as light entertainment, with all the edges sanded off: it's not furiously angry or inconsolably upset or wildly nihilistic in its pursuit of fun. It's the sound of economic prosperity. There's something about it that suggests a vague sense of melancholy, or dissatisfaction, as if things haven't turned out quite the way people expected...