Oasis look fertile in a modern desert

I was a Beatles teenager. Hearing a group like Oasis creates a sense of deja vu. I am back in a rock group in Clonmel in the mid-1960s, crowded around a record player with my school friends, guitars in hand, waiting for that magic moment when the new Beatles LP release would hit the deck.

The record clatters onto the rotating turntable, the playing arm is swinging out to sense the record's edge, the stylus drops to the jet-black vinyl, and the speaker comes to life with an onair hum - Harrison's lead guitar soars over a chunky Lennon blues riff and McCartney's bass timber softens the driving energy out of which the voices are propelled.

"It was 20 years ago today, Ser- geant Pepper taught the band to play/They were going on and out of style, but were guaranteed to raise a smile."

It's more like 30 years now since the Beatles released the Ser- geant Pepper album and the time is marked by the release of a third recording from the Manchester band, Oasis. Unashamedly acknowledging their musical debt to the Beatles, the group seems to have achieved a synthesis in the 1990s of three decades of pop music culture.

I was somewhat familiar with the first two Oasis recordings from dipping in and out of our two sons' cassette collection. It interested me that both Eoin (17) and Micheal (13), while being curious about the Oasis sound, were, in the end, unimpressed.

Maybe it was because Eoin was already some three years into Van the Man, and Micheal's cassette collection included Sergeant Pep- per, which he knew back to front.

Last month, I fished out my clean copy of Sergeant Pepper, complete with cardboard cutouts. I even resurrected an old valve record player to put it on. The tricks of the turntable were "cool" for my onlooking progeny. Micheal had no recollection of ever seeing a vinyl-playing apparatus like this and Eoin had forgotten the warm sound of analogue recording in the face of the digital sound revolution of the 1980s.

So what is the new Oasis album about? Will the music last? Is it guaranteed to raise a smile? Is it going anywhere? I turned it up to top volume and settled back to share the journey.

In one of John Lennon's final interviews, he said rock music's message to world was "to be here now". The Oasis album, Be Here Now, is presented as a journey, with minimal spacing between tracks and with some songs running without a break into the following one.

The effect is like a rock oratorio - and there are plenty of spiritual allusions to fuel this: "I met my maker and I made him cry", "I ain't never spoke to God and I ain't never been to Heaven", "All around the world, you've got to spread the word . . . We gonna make a better day".

And there are at least three "anthems" here, D'you Know What I Mean?, Stand By Me, and All Around The World.

All of this is in the tradition of community music and most of the songs are singable on first hearing.

It is because there is nothing innovative about this music that it is "kickin' up a storm". It is traditional rock'n'roll. It is conservative in tune, text, and treatment and its fertility lies in its consolidating properties.

At the eye of the storm lie the songs of Noel Gallagher. Oasis is, in essence, a rock orchestration of Gallagher's songs. And these songs are simple, direct and unpretentious.

"Damn my education, I can't find the words to say," as a line in a song about his mother (Don't Go Away) doesn't stop him searching for them.

The rhymes are dangerously near "painting by numbers" at times. The words lean heavily on these rhymes, treating them as stepping stones across the texts' meaning. And it's the regularity of the space between those stepping stones, backed up by the solid, almost total predictability of the tunes, which make the Oasis experience so contained.

If you want the text to break loose, it won't. If you want the tune to soar on occasion, it won't. The album production may seek to bring us on a journey but the songs remain content to "be here now".

Noel Gallagher has his musical feet firmly on the ground at the heart of his own sound and he wants you in that sonic space with him, contained within a wall of digital multi-track, multi-layered guitar riffs.

Strip it all away (as happens toward the end of Don't Go Away) and you find him on his own in his room with an acoustic guitar singing any of these songs in their original completeness.

This is the strength of the Oasis experience. When the group manages its inevitable break-up, he may well be the only musical survivor.

Regardless of what he says ("I don't need to write as a course of therapy . . . I don't need to exorcise any demons" - Q Magazine interview), Noel Gallagher is working on himself in these songs. In his own words, he is famous, wealthy, Irish, Catholic, working class, "half an atheist and half a coward". Plenty of songs in that.

Listening to the new album I started to sketch the main melodic motifs as each track progressed. While the basic musical language is still rooted in the blues, I was intrigued at how easily so many of his musical ideas were redolent of the Irish song tradition. There is much here that would fall neatly onto uilleann pipes.

And as the reprise of All Around The World shows, orchestral versions of some songs would work, as they did for the Beatles in their time.

Leaning back on the Beatles has helped the music to integrate with something within the traditional sound of these islands, while at the same time sounding off as a global high-tech experience.

But there is a diversity about the output of the Beatles on all levels other than technical (thematic, textual, melodic, metricla, rhythmical, harmonic, orchestral) which Oasis cannot match. Because it's been done before it can only be revisited for a new generation. Running the tape backwards on the opening track seems to pull any notion of progress back.

The cul-de-sac which rock music now finds itself in is a desert, within which Oasis is represented as fertile ground. The Beatles were a cultural holding exercise; entertainment while awaiting the next chapter in the real story. However, Gallagher wants "all my people right here right now" to "stand by me - nobody knows the way it's gonna be".

It is an oasis with some style. It certainly raises a smile and, in the process, not a few hearts.