AudioFileZ Review of Oasis: Supersonic

Oasis: Supersonic (2016)

Documents A Latter-Day Beatle Mania Like Popularity With Warts

[7/10 · 22 March 2017]

Oasis is probably the post-Beatles band that captured a piece of that band's impressive rise thirty years on. It was a long time since The Fab Four had done it, and to see an impressive degree of that mania in a latter-day setting was, perhaps, unbelievable in that it was generally accepted it would never happen again. Though history will downplay it today for a run of almost five years it was like the craziness of 1964 all over again. Only this time not just the era was different. The band itself was like a battlefield sewn with landmines. The Beatles, mostly, made peace offerings among themselves allowing more greatness to spawn even as they, wisely, quit touring. So what caused Oasis to truncate their massive popularity? Supersonic gives that insight. Unlike The Beatles, whose settled on democracy worked, with Oasis something explosive was always brewing. It began and ended with Noel being the creative leader and Liam being the mercurial equal that wasn't really equal at all within the band - even as he was more loved by many fans. Something that only competitive blood brothers are saddled with. Add more anger, bad drugs, and recklessness to the Gallagher brothers and it seems a wonder the band achieved what it did. This is a warts and all look into their wild ride. It could have shown more shed blood, but the viewer gets it quite well with the chaos shown here. As of 2016 that chaos matters less and like Noel says the music is still here. That doesn't mean you don't pine for what could have been if a massive dose of maturity just couldn't have plopped itself down. But, you get a glimpse of why that was never really what Oasis ran on. It ran on borrowed time and in it's short time it conquered the world musically and left a lot to still enjoy. Like so much great music it was an alchemy of a certain space and time which could only exist for a finite period. This is a pretty entertaining, though often uneasy, window into that time. It's very likely to be a protracted time for any other band to get a window into Beatle Mania (i.e. mania, not importance), so watch this in a bit of amazement as it may never happen in this century, or ???