As the principal songwriter of Oasis, Noel Gallagher may have gone as far as he can with the pop song. In the past decade he has written epic anthems and earnest love odes and impossibly sticky melodies that were inescapable on the radio. And yet, for all that variety, he's still not above using the old tried-and-true devices, the stuff that worked for Jerry Lee Lewis and the Beatles, to get his point across. On the uneven Heathen Chemistry, he seeks transcendence through a pummeling and thoroughly transfixing T. Rex grind ("The Hindu Times," a magnificent drone) but then can't resist a softheaded power ballad ("Stop Crying Your Heart Out"). His most rousing tune, the U2-ish "(Probably) All in the Mind," reconfigures the twelve-bar blues into a metaphysical meditation, while his most contrived offering, "Little by Little," is the kind of earnest "Wind Beneath My Wings" crap even Bryan Adams would know to edit.

As on the last few Oasis outings, particularly the arrogant Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, from 2000, Noel's nerdy-architect tendencies are counterbalanced by the bratty and hedonistic snarl of his brother Liam, who delivers lines such as, "Talking to myself again/This time I think I'm getting through," with a blend of disconsolate moping and simmering, self-loathing frustration he should consider patenting. Liam wrote several songs — the overweening "Songbird," the inspired neopsychedelic fantasy "Born on a Different Cloud" — but it's his torn-apart vocals that redeem the better material on Chemistry, providing the blood and the guts, the heathen-ness and humanness necessary to make the songs feel like declarations from the heart, not idle exercises.

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.