Oasis - Take Me - Non-Album Tracks (1991-1993)

I have to admit that I like Oasis. Yeah, the feuding of the Gallagher brothers has been an embarrassment, and they've put out some bad music, and their production (especially wanting to "brickwall" everything) has often ruined things. But when they've been on, such as with their 1995 album "(What's the Story) Morning Glory," they've often achieved greatness.

I plan on posting a bunch of albums to separate the wheat from the chaff. They have a surprising number of really good songs that never made any album, and their acoustic versions of their songs have been consistently excellent, and also avoid the overproduction issues of most of their albums.

Naturally, I want to start at the beginning. Oasis began as a band called "the Rain," which featured Liam Gallagher on lead vocals. They already were developing their famous Oasis sound, but they had very little in the way of good original songs. Liam's older brother Noel had been writing lots of songs, and joined the band in 1991, around the time they changed the name to Oasis. They didn't start to hit it big until mid-1994, when their first single was officially released.

This album deals with their years before they got famous or had a record contract. Luckily, they made a bunch of well-recorded demos of songs that they left behind. Also luckily, a lot of those songs were pretty good. I've been very choosy here, including only the songs I like, and only the ones with very good sound quality. Happily, that turns out to be exactly one album's worth of music (52 minutes).

I believe three of the songs towards the start of this album, "Alice," "Reminisce," and "Take Me," were written by Liam Gallagher and Bonehead, rather than Noel. The first two were recorded before Noel joined the band, possibly while they were still called the Rain. It's pretty hard to tell though, since they already sound very much like Oasis.

The songs generally get better as the album goes along, showing how the band was steadily improving. The fact that one 1992 reject, "All Around the World," would become a number one hit in 1997 despite not changing much shows that most or all of these songs were worthy of release. But only two of them came out as early B-sides ("I Will Believe" and "Alive"), while another eventually got released as a bonus track ("Strange Thing"). Everything else here remains officially unreleased.

The last song, "Coming On Strong," is basically the exact same song as "Setting Son," which was a 1996 hit for the Chemical Brothers with Noel Gallagher singing lead vocals. The lyrics and melody are the same, and just the instrumentation and production are significantly different. "Lock All the Doors" later morphed into "My Sister Lover," a 1997 B-side. It also was reworked and included on the 2015 Noel Gallagher album "Chasing Yesterday."

In my opinion, Oasis were at their best prior to the 1997 album "Be Here Now," and were only occasionally brilliant after that, because they were undone by drugs, fame, and ego. I consider this album part of their early peak.

01 Alice (Oasis)
02 Reminisce (Oasis)
03 Colour My Life (Oasis)
04 Take Me (Oasis)
05 See the Sun (Oasis)
06 Life in Vain (Oasis)
07 All Around the World (Oasis)
08 I Will Believe (Oasis)
09 Lock All the Doors [Early Version of My Sister Lover] (Oasis)
10 Alive (Oasis)
11 Strange Thing (Oasis)
12 Coming On Strong [Early Version of Setting Sun] (Oasis)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15909057/Osis_1991-1993_TakMe_atse.zip.html

There's a YouTube video of Oasis performing "All Around the World" in somebody's house in 1992. The picture I used as the cover art is a still taken from that video. It's kind of low resolution, and only singer Liam Gallagher can be seen, but I thought it sums up early Oasis perfectly, because you can see a Beatles poster in the background, along with the British flag stenciled on the wall.