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Peter: I gave this a quick listen the other night and it was kind of fascinating to revisit it.

Tyler: I’ve relistened three times.  It had been so long since I returned to it.

Let’s break off a little history for our readers?  We’re here today to discuss Peter & Tyler all-timers Oasis.  Specifically, the band’s fifth album, a 2003 release dumbly called Heathen Chemistry.  The LP was the first to feature new members Andy Bell and Gem, following up 2000’s Gallagher-exclusive Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants.  Peter, we went back to SOTSOG last year, and were both pleasantly surprised.  Does its follow-up pass muster?

Peter: No. No, it does not.

Spoiler alert!

Tyler: This album upon release was such a letdown.

Even in the wake of really disliking SOTSOG, I felt dissatisfied with HC.

Peter: That’s interesting! I was pretty pleased with it at the time. Longtime readers will know that our journeys as fans of Oasis followed very different paths. I was a big fan of their second record and you discovered them on their third. But I think we both followed the larger cultural reaction of feeling let down by the mid-career slump represented by HC and SOTSOG. That being said, I thought I preferred Heathen Chemistry to Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. Upon further examination, that is just not the case anymore.

Tyler: I’m with you—my memory had HC slotted above SOTSOG.  Now, things have switched, and I reckon that HC is the band’s lowest ebb in the studio.

Peter: Don’t get me wrong, there are some real bangers here. It’s still an Oasis album, after all. But, I agree, this is their worst album…

Tyler: “Breaking!  Writers’ Loom has the final word: Heathen Chemistry lacks for chemistry.”

That’s not necessarily true.  The band comes together on some tracks.  They’re just not the most inspired pieces of material.

Peter: We’re really selling this chat. I can feel the engagement numbers dropping. Stay tuned, dear readers! We’ll make it fun! I promise! You won’t want to miss this one!

Tyler: “Loom review crashes and burns: bad album, bad discussion.”

Peter: I love the idea that there’s a fictional universe where people report on our chats.

Tyler: “New report: They’re onto us.”

There’s also a fictional universe where people read our chats.  Ba-ZING!

Peter: Okay, let’s get into this.

The album opens with a stone-cold classic in the ridiculously titled “The Hindu Times.”

Tyler: This song is fucking fire.

At the time of release it felt a little airy, maybe soft.  I didn’t get it.  In recent years I’ve gone back and enjoyed the holy hell out of it.

My best guess about the title, mind you, is that the primary guitar line sounds vaguely like a sitar.

Peter: Wikipedia mentions that many people share your suspicion. Noel said he saw it on a T-shirt in Ibiza. Anyway, it slaps. I can’t remember where I read this, but someone called it a “magnificent drone.”

Tyler: Oh, yeah, a t-shirt in Ibiza.  Noel was probably tripping wasted stoned and came up with a hallucinogen-induced non-memory.

In Ibiza, I mean.  Isn’t that what people do there?  Party like it’s 1999?

Peter: That is my understanding. What happens in Ibiza stays in Ibiza.

Tyler: I recall Noel joking about how he met second wife Sara MacDonald while attempting to be crazy in Ibiza.  Not exactly what you go there for, was his implication.

Peter: “The Hindu Times” is a real departure from his songwriting on the first three albums, though it does cop a riff from a Stereophonics song (Noel’s tendency to nick bits from other artists remaining intact).

Tyler: Liam sounds good on it. There are songs we’ll get to here that may have been recorded after he woke from a long nap.

Peter: I should note, it also took me some time to really fall for this song, but now it’s one of my all-time favorites.

Tyler: Same here.  I mean, I was thinking on it earlier, what top-# would “Hindu Times” rate for me.  Top 25 Oasis favorites?  Top 15?  It’s up there.

Peter: Not one of my all time favorites? Our next track, “Force of Nature.”

Tyler: “Force Of Nature” put me in a bad mood on the way to work a few mornings ago.  I skipped ahead after, I dunno, less than a minute.  My commute is blessedly brief, and whatever I listen to en route stays in my head for hours, so I gotta choose carefully.

Peter: I hadn’t heard it in like 20 years, but, wow, I really don’t care for it.

Tyler: A review at the time noted that this is the kind of song that Noel should’ve outgrown by then.

“You’re smokin’ all my stash!  You’re burning all my cash!”  You’re hurting my ears!

What kind of rock star has such a limited stash of grass that their paramour can go through it all?

Peter: We’ve talked about Noel’s lyrics and how, at his best, he churned out supremely cool-sounding nonsense. Rock and roll gibberish plucked from the sparkly ether or born of some unholy combination of illegal substances and youth. At his worst, he sounds forced. This doesn’t sound like it came to him in a dream state, it sounds like he needed a tune for an album to tour behind and there were deadlines and lawyers and adult things that needed attention and whatever he came up with would have to do.

Tyler: It’s got that whole nadir-of-Britpop “lad” sensibility.  Soccer hoodlum dross.

Peter: Exactly, it’s like the Stones sliding into self-parody in the 80s. That kind of vibe.

Tyler: The next track ain’t much better. “Hung In A Bad Place.”

Another wannabe-swagger, actually-sleepy piece of non-essential lame-rock, this one from the pen of Oasis-newbie Gem, an established musician that clearly wanted to fit in with whatever he thought Oasis were, or whatever the Gallaghers wanted from him.

Seriously, Liam is noticably disengaged on this song.  He sounds like he couldn’t be bothered.  Even his sneery tossed-off “You’n got me!” is contrived.

Peter: I don’t mind this one as much, though that’s not much of an endorsement.

Tyler: Just as “Force Of Nature” tries to lurch its way into our “Cigarettes and Alcohol”-favoring hearts, “Hung In A Bad Place” is a supremely-unmemorable slab of mega-diluted Definitely Maybe.

Peter: The tune is just sort of lazy, and you’re right that Liam sounds pretty checked out. Like about half of the songs here, it’s dressed-up filler.

Luckily, things get at least somewhat back on track with our next song, “Stop Crying Your Heart Out.”

Tyler: See, this one went unnoticed in the States, but is beloved in Britain, if memory serves, thanks to a dramatic England loss in, like, the World Cup or some such tournament.  Those Englanders really felt “Stop Crying Your Heart Out.”  With that in mind, it’s a little tough for me to take the song seriously.

Peter: It definitely has that crying in your beer, pub singalong before close, kind of feel.

I forgot to mention, “Hindu Times” was the lead single and it went to number 1 in the UK. “Stop Crying” was the follow-up. It peaked at number 2.

Tyler: I just don’t feel it.

Peter: Maybe if you were a pasty English lad watching football on the telly and popping off to the loo to jolly roger your chips, you’d understand.

I’ve really got my finger to the pulse of what it is to be English, I think.

Tyler: The bombast is too much.  We can get into this toward our conclusion, but the band’s next album after Heathen Chemistry was a tremendous return to form, and features only one “classic”-style Oasis ballad, called “Let There Be Love.”  “Let There”‘s gentle restraint lifted it above a transitional belter like “Stop Crying” that has appeal, but feels, again, at least a little contrived.

Hell, give me Be Here Now’s “Stand By Me” over “Stop Crying Your Heart Out.”  The latter is, yes, leaner, but it doesn’t have the guts.  To my ears, anyway.

Peter: I remember feeling like it was too obviously reaching back. It felt like Noel was trying to write a hit in the vein of “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” In his heyday, he didn’t have to try (that’s how it felt anyway).

Tyler: Exactly!

Noel-by-numbers is better than a lot of other artists going through the motions.  But, it’s no less discouraging.

Peter: Okay, next up is “Songbird,” Liam’s second foray into songwriting.

It’s worlds better than his first attempt, the much-maligned “Little James,” off SOTSOG.

Tyler: Okay, I love “Songbird.”  It’s a delight.

Peter: It is a delightful romp. Who knew he had it in him?

It was pretty surprising at the time.

Tyler: Was it not written for a member of Brit pop-group sensation All Saints?

Liam married one ‘a those ladies, I believe.

Peter: Wikipedia confirms it was written for Liam’s then-fiancee, and All Saints member, Nicole Appleton.

Tyler: Take that, Wikipedia!  Who needs you!

Peter: No computer can replace you!

Tyler: Fie on AI!

GLEEBOP BOP I AM ARTIFICIAL OASIS—

Nothing to see here!  No glitches in the system!  Onward to The Oasis Heather Chemical!

Peter: I, for one, applaud our new AI overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted music blogger, I can be useful in rounding up others to be cocooned in their body-heat fueled nightmare world.

My flexible morals could even be bent to the point of saying I don’t hate our next song, the utterly dreadful “Little by Little.”

My wife likes this song and it absolutely eats me up inside.

Tyler: It’s so bad.  It’s so so bad.  I’m sorry to hear about the divorce.

Peter: It went to number 2 in the UK!

Tyler: What caused that?  A devastating cricket playoff?

I hated this song when the album came out and I really detest it now.  What a struggle to endure.

I love Noel and forgive him all the time.  Getting past this one took some penance.

Peter: I absolutely hate the lyrics to this song. At one point he sings, “You know I didn’t mean/What I just said.” It’s as if he couldn’t be bothered to run a line through it so he just called out his own lazy bullshit.

Tyler: “Why am I really here?”, he asks.  Yikes.

Peter: This song is deep! His God woke up on the wrong side of his bed!

Tyler: Have mercy on us all, grumpy God.  Noel didn’t mean anything by it.

Peter: Just awful. Truly horrid. As forced as much of this album sounds today, this song takes the cake. An attempt at shameless pandering gone awry, this one belongs at the bottom of the scrap heap of Oasis-by-numbers filler that plagues their lesser releases.

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