The law of diminishing returns – Not to mention pop music logic – would suggest that the first single by Beady Eye (Essentially, Oasis except without Noel Gallagher, who left in a strop one night) would be terrible. After all, the band had been on a slow downward spiral for years, and Gallagher was always the musical heart of the band and the lead songwriter. How could anything from Beady Eye sound like anything more than an okay performance of shitty music?
To be fair, that’s a pretty apt description of everything off their first album with the exception of that first single, “Bring The Light.” Because, while it’s not pretty, “Bring The Light” is a song that I find myself weirdly adoring. Maybe it’s the unexpectedness – Here’s a song that’s driven by an unstoppable piano, female backing vocals and handclaps, three things that seem amazingly anti-Oasis. They’re definitely the hooks for what is otherwise a fairly ugly, misshapen song (Really, it just doesn’t work, structurally), but what hooks. They driving the song forward and pull you (me) along with it, even though part of you (me) is still thinking “Wait, is there actually a song here at all?”
Everytime I listen to this, I end up thinking that the backing vocalists and pianist should go off and form their own band, and be more interesting elsewhere. It’s a better fate.