This week I’m revisiting an album that was either a triumphant return to form or the sound of a band who’d stopped trying depending which review you read. But contemporary critics almost always got Oasis albums wrong. So let’s look afresh at their 2002 album, Heathen Chemistry.

Oasis are one of my all-time favourites, and this came out at the peak of my Oasis fandom. But unlike some of their other releases this one has languished more-or-less unplayed in my CD collection for years. I loved it in 2002, but how will it sound now?

First impressions are pretty good. The Hindu Times has all the basic constituents of a good Oasis song: swagger, soft drug references and a chorus involving “rock ‘n’ roll”. It’s like a matured version of Rock & Roll Star, the opener on their still-blistering 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe. But it’s also got some of the downsides of the archetypal Oasis song; for example the tedious weather references (“you’re my sunshine, you’re my rain.”). What any of this has to do with Hinduism is anyone’s guess. Overall it’s a paint-by-the-numbers Oasis song – which is something you can say of the whole album.

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Remember Feeder? ‘He’s got a brand new car… it’s got leather seats, it’s got a CD player, player, player, player’. How about now? This week I’m revisiting their massive breakthrough album, Echo Park.

Feeder was music almost everyone could agree on. Indie enough for people like me, heavy enough for the nu-metal kids, catchy enough for those who just listened to chart pop. They were unlikely to get turned off in the sixth-form common room or at a party. No doubt there will have been an iconoclast or two who hated them, but generally speaking, the consensus was that Feeder were ‘alright’.

But they weren’t anyone’s favourite band, either. Whilst writing this, I asked my sister if she remembered them. With only two years between us, we used to share a lot of music back then. She replied that she bought their albums and went to their concerts without even really liking them that much.

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It was the multi-platinum selling album that dragged British indie-rock out of the doldrums. But at the time, Is This It more or less passed me by. In this article, I’ll be revisiting this seminal debut album, and asking: in hindsight, is it all it’s cracked up to be?

The Strokes were the ultimate in don’t-give-a-fuck, New York cool. Back in high school, this gave the band associations I didn’t care for. I associated them with a certain type of apathetic trendie; the kids who’d been into Ibiza dance music just a year or two earlier and suddenly morphed into bed-haired indie fans. The least cool trait in their book was to be seen to care about anything. Whilst I was being politicised by the Iraq War, these guys directed their snark towards anti-war protesters and Bush supporters alike.

I suppose what they were afraid of was being into anything that the piss might feasibly be taken out of. This album, right down to its mildly sexually suggestive cover art, was a safe bet. They all owned it. Just like they all owned By The Way by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Consequently, I thought the album wasn’t for me.

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This week, I’m revisiting R.E.M.’s Around The Sun – an album that really pissed me off at the time. Will time heal this most disappointing of wounds?

Context matters, so I’d better explain how I came to this album. My introduction to the colossus of alternative rock that was R.E.M. was through their excellent 2001 album, Reveal, and from there I discovered the rest: Automatic For The People, Out Of Time and Document.

R.E.M. are an enigmatic band, whose albums contained big singalong hits alongside poetic, thoughtful tracks with often quite esoteric, folk-infused lyrics. R.E.M. were, in my opinion, one of the biggest bands in the world because they were one of the best bands in the world.

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“Something of a rarity this, a Christian band who are neither Celtic nor crap,” was Q Magazine’s 1999 verdict of Delirious?, probably Britain’s most successful Christian rock group (and question mark enthusiasts). In this article, I’ll be revisiting the album Audio Lessonover? – and a teenage obsession.

In my mid-teens, Christianity was a big part of my life. Church had evolved from something I did because some of my friends attended, into a central pillar of my identity. This mostly involved trying to appear as ‘spiritual’ as possible and looking forward to going weekend Christian youth events where I would discover Delirious?.

Q Magazine had been correct; most of the music at these events wasn’t great – mainly samey worship songs. But Delirious? were different. The Christianity was inspiring, not preachy, and with their Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers influences, here was a band that not only shared and reinforced my beliefs, but was also capable of accompanying the emotional ups and downs of teenage life.

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Being a teenager sucks, but at least we’ve got music to get us through it. Recently, I’ve been revisiting the soundtrack of my teen years of the early 2000s to see how some of the albums I listened to back then stack up today.

In the first of a series of articles, I’m looking at The Stereophonics’ Just Enough Education To Perform – or ‘JEEP’ if the lawyers at Daimler-Chrysler hadn’t intervened. This one was absolutely everywhere. The distinctive green cover was to be found even on the shelves of friends whose tastes veered more towards manufactured pop or Ibiza dance music than indie-rock. Or who weren’t particularly interested in music at all.

I actually remember buying this album, queuing in the Lichfield WH Smiths to buy the CD in its security protected Perspex container, as you did back when CDs were sufficiently valuable that shops actively worried about people nicking them. I recall liking it at the time, but what about now?

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