(What's the Story) Morning Glory?

Twelve tracks, and the subtractive test bites often. Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Cast No Shadow and Champagne Supernova cannot go: they are the record. Morning Glory carries the title and the one surge of aggression after the opener. Beyond them the case weakens. Hello announces a return, “good to be back”, on a partly borrowed chorus; Roll With It is a slogan riff that restates the debut’s manner; Hey Now! circles its figure for over five minutes with no turn; She’s Electric is a pleasant music-hall pastiche with no office in the argument. The long outros are partly the anthem’s insistence and partly length permitted. Perhaps a third could be lost with little loss.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The words disclose little that can be stated: by the writer’s own later account they are phrases chosen for sound, and Champagne Supernova sets images, “caught beneath the landslide”, that do not resolve into a meaning. Sound is credited as fully as words, and sound discloses more: a collective wish to be lifted, in which melancholy is turned at once into a chorus and regret is forgiven before it is examined, “Sally can wait”. Don’t Look Back in Anger comes nearest to a stated truth, acceptance offered as consolation, and Cast No Shadow names a songwriter unable to say what he means. What comes through is a mood of yearning and arrival, powerfully rendered, not an articulated condition.

Score: 6.8 / 10

Here the record is strong. Height comes often: Wonderwall, whose strummed figure and cello lift into a chorus that lands on a held, unresolved promise; Don’t Look Back in Anger, whose piano opening gives way to the record’s broadest chorus; Cast No Shadow, quieter, rising on slide guitar and close harmony; Morning Glory, height of the dreadful kind, a wall of guitar beginning under the sound of a helicopter; and Champagne Supernova, building from waves and acoustic guitar to a long, heavy plateau and back to the sea. Five or six of ten songs rise. What holds the figure from the top is kind: the height is almost always the same height, the massed chorus of stacked guitars and voice.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth is evoked and nowhere built. The record summons patterns as atmosphere: the saviour hoped for in Wonderwall, a figure of rescue held at a distance and never given a face; the forgiving glance backward in Don’t Look Back in Anger; the poet bound to a gift he cannot use, in Cast No Shadow; and in Champagne Supernova a cosmic image of youth and excess, “slowly walking down the hall” toward something larger than the self that is never named. The title track makes a dawn of a comedown. None of these bears load, because the particulars that would make them stand are withheld: no place, no year, no person with a history, only a Sally named for her sound.

Score: 6.6 / 10

The inheritance is plain and avowed: the Beatles above all, the Stones, the Who, the Faces, T. Rex and Slade, the Jam and Weller, the Manchester of the Stone Roses; the piano opening of Don’t Look Back in Anger echoes Imagine. The record does not depart from this tradition; it consolidates it, and that is its aim. The turn credited is from the band’s own debut, the speed and sneer of Definitely Maybe (1994), toward ballads, acoustic guitar, strings, mid-tempo anthems and a second lead singer. That turn carried a stake, softer songs at the centre of the follow-up to a first summit, but it was placed on the most proven path in British popular music, and a turn from one’s own manner toward the canon is not a swerve from the tradition.

Score: 6.3 / 10

The sequence is shaped with intent, and it is counted here once. Hello opens with a few bars of Wonderwall before the noise breaks in, so the record begins by announcing a return. The two untitled fragments, cut from one jam, divide it into three movements; the dawn of Morning Glory precedes the second; Champagne Supernova closes on the sound of the sea with which it began, a frame that gives the record an ending rather than a stop. That is form serving the record’s one knowledge, the lift and the comedown. What holds the figure on the floor is that the frame holds songs that could stand in another order or alone, as four did as singles, with the best-known front-loaded and the middle run by alternation.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Thirty-one years supply evidence large in quantity and narrow in kind. The songs are returned to constantly, sung by crowds and learned by guitarists as first songs, and they hold up to that return as songs. What the return yields is the same each time. The words were never meant to open further, as the writer has said, and the meaning of Champagne Supernova is a standing joke rather than a field of reading. Formally, the guitar overdubs offer little new detail on close listening, since the mastering flattens the layers into one mass. Critical return has been to the record as an event, the summit of Britpop, more than to an object that reorganises on hearing. A wide well, and shallow.

Score: 6.8 / 10

The field is the rock and guitar-pop album of the mid 1990s, British and American. Intrinsic force is small: the record reorganised no possibility of the album or the song. It restored a classic British songwriting manner to the scale of the stadium at the moment American grunge had ebbed, and much of what followed it imitated a manner already old, narrowing rather than opening the field. The figure holds small force against large reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record marked the commercial height of Britpop, set the template for a decade of British guitar bands, from Ocean Colour Scene and Cast through Stereophonics and Travis to the anthem rock of the 2000s, and turned a generation of listeners toward the guitar. It stands three tenths below The Bends, the British guitar record of the same year, whose heirs also took its manner but whose refinement opened a road where this record’s consolidation narrowed one; and a tenth below Siamese Dream, a consolidation of its own field, whose reach was mostly American but whose joining of sounds was its own.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been kept in print. Presence is as wide as any album of its decade. Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger are among the most heard British songs of their time, and the second was sung by crowds as a civic hymn in Manchester after the arena bombing of 2017. That widest presence earns a tenth at most, and popularity is not proof of permanence. The fabric is charged: a mastering among the loudest of its year and a mark of its era, and a sound fixed to 1995. The tenth earned and the tenth charged cancel.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is real and in places exceptional. The chorus of Don’t Look Back in Anger and the verse-to-chorus turn of Wonderwall are built with a sure hand, and Wonderwall is the best-made arrangement: strummed acoustic, cello, a drum part that drives without crowding. Liam Gallagher’s voice is a commanding instrument, its nasal sustain carrying every chorus. The costs fall wide. The guitars are stacked into a wall and the mastering compresses the whole until dynamics nearly vanish, so that Champagne Supernova climbs without space to climb into, and Hey Now! and Roll With It are thick without being built. The rhythm section is plain, the solos borrowed, the harmony narrow.

Score: 7.5 / 10

One law governs the record: the chorus as communal arrival, every song driving toward a moment a crowd can sing, through ringing open chords and a voice held long. Take the two most distant elements, the near-acoustic Wonderwall and the helicopter and guitar wall of Morning Glory: both obey it, and so do the music-hall She’s Electric and the long Champagne Supernova. The fragments and the framing sea keep the parts under one sky. What holds the figure is range. One tempo band, one harmonic language and one register of feeling, between swagger and wistfulness, give the law little to govern, and narrowness is not coherence. She’s Electric obeys by pastiche, Hello and Roll With It by habit.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and this is the lowest axis. Consciousness is held, as a mood of longing and release. The hoped-for rescuer is held at a distance in Wonderwall; memory and forgiveness in Don’t Look Back in Anger; the artist and his gift in Cast No Shadow; youth and intoxication in Champagne Supernova and Morning Glory; a crowd implied in every chorus. Class, the north of England and the Britain of 1995 surround the record, in its legend and its audience, and are barely in it. The family appears as a joke in She’s Electric. Labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent. What there is lies close together, held in one mood and joined by no structure.

Score: 5.9 / 10