Be Here Now. Please! Oasis @ The Patriot Center
Forget everything you thought you knew about Oasis!
I kid, of course. While Los Bros. Gallaghers and The Whomevers may continue to rate themselves in the Beatles-Stones pantheon, they’ve got a lot more in common with AC/DC or the Black Crowes. This is a band that prides itself on being proof against evolution.
I’ll give them this much: “Rock and Roll Star” is one hell of a way to open a rock 'n' roll show. It’s the best example of everything (and probably the only thing) Oasis does masterfully: their swaggeringly low ambition, their success in conjuring the same air of decadence and entitlement the Stones had back before any of us were born. Plus there’s that chorus that automatically twists your face into a sneer when you sing it! It’s from their first album, 1994’s Definitely Maybe, as you surely know. And they’ve never improved upon it, which you probably know, too, whether you want to admit it or not.
It isn’t even all that big a problem that Liam Gallagher, hands down the meanest tambourine player in Britpop, might not be quite able to sing it any more. Launching into the wish-fulfillment anthem at a close-to-full Patriot Center Saturday night, he sounded flat and out-of-breath. When he returned to his group’s debut album for “Cigarettes and Alcohol” (which was covered by Rod Stewart, and would, in fact, sound right at home on the Faces box set) a few songs later, he struggled again, relying on that bark-singing thing that plagued Mick Jagger in the mid-'70s, when the Stones were as far into their preternaturally extended career as Oasis are now. But if Liam or his brother, band-engine Noel Gallagher, betrayed any flash of doubt on the question of his innate magnificence, he’d be in another band, wouldn’t he?
Bodies, and voices, change over the course of a decade-and-a-half. That’s life, Mate. But Oasis doesn’t want to change. “I’m trying salmon. That’s as far as my interest in new things go,” Liam Gallagher recently declaimed. No surprise, then, that Oasis’s Saturday night gig felt remarkably similar to the only Oasis show I’d attended previously — in 1996, when they really were the cocks of the walk on both sides of the Atlantic. Even half the set list was the same, despite the fact that they’ve released five studio albums since, dutifully checking off the beloved warhorses from the first Clinton Administration, which, shaky vocals aside, still sound fab. And why shouldn’t they? Oasis is a great singles band.
It is are not, however, a great live band. Which isn’t to say that they couldn’t be. They just don’t seem interested. Los Bros. Gallagher are forever citing their working-class Manchester backgrounds, so maybe it's fully deliberate that their performing persona comes across as so, well, workmanlike. Which can look a lot like boredom from the other side of a sports arena.
If ever an audience might have reasonable cause to expect something a little different, a little special, a little irreverent, a tour-ending gig five days before Christmas would be the time. But we got the same 20-song setlist the band has apparently performed on every other date of this tour, ostensibly built around the half-dozen tracks included from this year’s pretty-good Dig Out Your Soul LP. None of the performances were bad. The gig was simply lacking in mystery or surprise.
Liam Gallagher is a bore as a frontman, standing stock still at the mic when he isn’t chugging bottled water or pacing around like he’s waiting to be called in for a job interview. His few song introductions were brief and mostly unintelligible. (He spent a quarter of the show offstage, apparently deciding that the songs Noel sung required no tambourine accompaniment.) Openers the Cardinals, a real band, it turns out, rather than just a bunch of nobodies propping up Ryan Adams, may have tested the crowd’s patience with their semi-funny stage banter, but at least they appeared to be having a good time.
But with a few exceptions — the stirring crowd singalong of “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” the one that goes, “please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band, and throw it all away” — it seemed the headliners would have performed much the same show for 10,000 empty seats. Before singing “The Importance of Being Idle”, Noel remarked that he’d visited the White House earlier that day. “It’s the same size as my house in London,” he cracked. “Virtually identical.” It was a great line, but otherwise he seemed disinterested even in stoking that kind of confrontational bile, something the gig most definitely could have used. Later on, when, speaking of the Cardinals, he quipped, “of all the support bands we’ve ever had, they’ve been the most recent,” it seemed like an out-of-nowhere slap at an act that was more fully present onstage than either of the Gallaghers.
Cool, reserved arrogance is Oasis’s schtick. Long live the Queen and all that. It just doesn’t make them great company over the course of an evening, or even 105 minutes. When Paul Weller, one of their spiritual antecedents, played the 9:30 Club a few months back, he managed to make the occasion feel celebratory without wrinkling his peacock suit.
“You’ve been great, but not as great as us,” Liam shrugged before kicking off their customary closer, “I Am the Walrus”. I beg to differ — the crowd had indeed been marvelous, bellowing along with the hits, and accepting the new songs with no detectable impatience. But Oasis? Here's my problem with Oasis: It's isn't that they claim to be the greatest band in the world. (No.) It's that they act like the job is boring. Talk about crushing your dreams!