Music Banter - Blur or Oasis

For me, the obvious answer to this question for me is Blur.

Modern Life Is Rubbish turned me into a listener, Parklife was great (The singles only hinted at the better album tracks), but for some reason I liked The Great Escape just as well. Skipping over "Stereotypes" which remains something that will not work for me, the rest of the album really has that "Things are not going too well" feeling that can either create something great or useless, depending on the talent...and as Blur have plenty of that, they came up with something pretty interesting.

As for Blur (The album) - "Death of a Party" NAILED down the feeling that a certain trend called "Britpop" was already gone even if was written during the classic Modern Life is Rubbish era, and it remains one of the best songs that reflects a heavy Specials influence. The rest of it varied in quality, but some of the songs remain their best making it very worthwhile.

13 - Although slacking off in places, any album with "Bugman," "Coffee and TV," "Swamp Song," "Trimm Trabb," and "No Distance Left to Run" will forever be in my collection. Think Tank was also good as well.

In short, they are a band that's not well-served on Best Of collections, but better experienced album by album, and that also means checking out Leisure. The debut may not have been great, but it did show that there was a band that was going to impress in it's best moments. They did many times over.

Oasis, however, had one great album (Defiantly Maybe, of course), one decent disc (...Morning Glory), and the occasional great single that should have hinted at some good songs elsewhere. To be fair, they did continue to release some catchy music as there's no denying that Noel Gallagher learned from his collection very well, but many of the headline grabbing stories and attitudes really killed off any serious respect for them, and while their last album marked a slight improvement, it was way too little too late in my opinion. They were always about being Rock and Roll at it's base level with obvious Beatles and Stones influence, so I never had expected them to go into more interesting areas while wearing their influence on their sleeves (A more recent observation: the opening shot of the "Shock of the Lightning" video looking like the cover to The Stones' Hot Rocks. It was cool with the Performance bit in the "Live Forever" video, but that was sad, especially for one of their better Post-Morning Glory songs), but sadly most of their history wallowed in cliches that have been repeated over and over again far too many times, and Be Here Now is clearly one over-baked album despite (again) having a couple of fine singles. They could have been so much more.