Musing

Beady Eye's BE Editor's Note: This is the 6th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! Beady Eye straddles the line between far-out and over-long in this, their second full album with this post-Oasis lineup. It's not that there are too many tunes, or even that all of them are too long, but that a couple (I'm looking at you, "Soul Love" and "Don't Brother Me") have extended outros that are a little much. But when they keep it fairly succinct, this album rocks. The album proper is 11 songs long, with up to six bonus tracks, depending on where you bought it. Of those, only 2-3 are tracks I ever skip. The first single was "Second Bite of the Apple," which was quite a departure from the fairly straightforward rock that dominated their pre...

Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding Editor's Note: This is the 7th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. If there was an award category here in the Top Ten something like "Album That Gave Me The Most Relief After Fearing It Would Suck," DGSS would have won it. The first single, "Bring The Light," is a good track, but it's pretty standard Liam fare - short on imaginative lyrics and reliant on three chords or fewer. I think the idea that Noel was the only good songwriter in Oasis is blatantly false. All four guys have songwriting talent. Noel just happens to be the most versatile. After this first single, I was afraid the Beady Eye album would be 11 repetitive tracks. ("Ain't Got Nothin'" anyone?) So, after a good deal of brash build-up by Liam, DGSS hit early in 2011 to a lot of surprise. Those in the "Noel is GOD!...

If you dismiss this album after the first track as a poor-man's Oasis, you've fooled yourself out of something pretty special here. You only have to go one track farther into the album to hear something that heavy-handed Noel would have never allowed onto an Oasis album. I would have been shocked to hear any of these tracks on Oasis-LP8 barring four. There's a sense of variety-with-cohesion that was lacking in Dig Out Your Soul . More importantly, it makes up for another lack in the last Oasis album: production. High quality VBR MP3's of DGSS sound better than listening to DOYS on CD or vinyl; I don't want to see Dave Sardy's name in the liner notes for any album ever again. I'm excited to hear the whole thing at CD quality in a couple of weeks!