This is my review of the new Oasis album - yes, yet another one, the follow-up to Don't Believe the Truth!
Pretentious, moi?

STOP PRESS…..

O.A.Piss
The shock new Oasis album, reviewed by
VOLCANIC PANIC – he’s more rock than a geology textbook!

Howdy doody, everybody.
After their slide from everyone’s favourite band to, well, everyone’s favourite band who make a good use for CDs as a coffee coaster, Oasis have stunned the entire monde de la musique by releasing their new album three years early, out of nowhere. Rumours abound this decision was taken regarding kidnapping attempts by notorious Colombian drugs baron, Juan Pablo Flangehell, though a more plausible suggestion’s that Noel Gallagher needs the money to fund a £60k-a-day Spongebob Squarepants DVD habit.

Anyway, cut the crap, as the Clash would say. I own all their albums. So eat it. The new album represents a radical departure for the Mancunian “rogue rockers”, with the bangin’ pop choons of Definitely Maybe, and Heathen Chemistry condemned to the dustbin of history - like a mofo. In many ways it represents a new beginning – despite it being their sixth album, Oasis have imaginatively titled the new LP “Oasis.” “We recently played a guerrilla gig in Turkmenistan,” Liam , “and we woz at a loose end namin’ our new fookin’ album, maaan, but when I saw this oasis in the desert the idea just came to me like a pin to a magnet. In’t that brilliant?” Right you are, Liam, right you are…

Tit.

The general feel is a dark, unforgiving and semi-Gothic industrial greasy piece, if we excuse the 10-minute cover of Big Mountain’s “Ooh Baby I Love Your Way”. Opening track “Friendly Fire with Nicky Wire”, fittingly recorded in an Essex scally abattoir, starts with a cacophony of blaring military distress signals, developing into a Shostakovich-meets-Rachmaninov Russian funeral march. Yeah, it’s anything but friendly, baby.

Oasis continues in a similar vein through the thundering “Nineteen-Inch Nails”, which hence the name, is twice as good as ‘90s “grunge grebos” Nine-Inch Nails, “Lovely Gruyere Cheese”, “Daniel Beddingplant’s Reign of Terror”, and Fisher Price xylophone-based prog-rock epic “Is That A Monster In My Pocket? No, I’m Just Pleased to See You, Zak Starkey.” It ain’t crowd pleasing Britpop, that’s for sure, and it doesn’t give happy, happy vibes – but at this stage I would describe it as a “guilty pleasure.” (You have to love it.) I’m not sure if there’s much choice. Well… “If you don’t I’m gonna knock your block off” Liam says. Sounds like “fighting talk” to me.

However, Oasis quickly runs out of ideas, especially considering Noel uses the same riff and chord structure for all 28 tracks, widely rumoured as copyright-violating Budgie the Little Helicopter. Many distressing, unsettling subjects are tackled, like war, violence, disease and watching The Adult Channel in front of one’s grandparents.
However, Noel has sadly lost his talent for enigmatic, original wordplay and the anti-rail privatisation rant, “Tommy Tank’s Dictatorial Coup” doesn’t quite fit Liam’s warbles of “We are the pigs and you’re our prostitutes, your sick evil trains go toot toot toot.”

The band’s disturbing fixation with childrens’ TV goes deeper with an atrocious ska-punk-death disco remix of the Playdays theme. However, it should be praised as their first genuine political protest song. “I remember when it was called Playbus and they changed the name!” “It’s fookin shite, this country’s going to the dogs, it’s fookin’ political correctness gone mad. I’m writing to my MP, I tell ya!” Then, after a brief sojourn into metrosexual Europop, the album grinds to a screeching halt.

YOU should write to your MP after hearing this sorry excuse for an album, or, in the Queen’s English, a bag of absolute steamin’ hot dog’s eggs. It looks unlikely Oasis will be filling stadiums in the near future – apart from at my house in quaint French Riviera village, Sac-de-Merde. But sometimes when I hear things like this I wish I had been born a girl, and not this mess of a man.

V.P.
“Your tip for the top, don’t stop!”
(Volcanic Panic, Fri 30 Sep 2005, 15:40, Reply)