Marchin' Already

Product Information

Marchin’ Already is OCS’s only album to hit the top of the charts, displacing the charmless bloated mess that was Oasis’s Be Here Now as it did so. Australian composer and producer Madeleine Cocolas has always been an artist who finds no need to differentiate in her inspired post-classical/ambient work.

Where it hits its highs, OCS prove themselves to be a great guitar-orientated rock band with a well honed soulful edge, however there’s also a fair bit of the album that sounds like retro-rock by numbers. Marchin’ Already is just one of those albums where the singles released from it overshadowed the vast majority of the album, with only the instrumental “All Up”, “Foxy’s Folk Faced” and the aforementioned “It’s a Beautiful Thing” avoiding that fate. This model was not built to last, so by the end of the decade Britpop had burned itself out, leading to mass-culls from record labels now desperate to save cash and leaving a bunch of acts who should never have seen the inside of a recording studio feeling really rather bitter about the entire experience.Opening with “100 Mile High City”, a guitar-tactic high water mark in the band’s career, it’s an album which kicks off with no little vim and vigour and the first three tracks raise the expectation that it may eclipse its predecessor. For the Marchin’ Already box (which will also be issued as a two-CD deluxe), the original album takes up the first disc and is joined by a second CD of B-sides, radio sessions and previously unreleased demos. This will come packaged with a book that includes new sleeve notes with testimony from the band themselves, four badges and a poster. It’s also an album which confirms the belief of some that at least two thirds of Britpop acts were capable of great singles, but struggled when it came to album-length statements (that said, there’s a truly great multi-artist box set of the Britpop Years still waiting to be compiled).

History suggests that they were always destined to dwell in the twin shadows of Paul Weller (pretty much Britpop’s only solo act) and the omnipresent Oasis, however at this point in the 90s, with Weller enduring something of a temporary lull in form and Oasis’ being exposed as the musical snake oil salesmen they had always been, OCS were able to outshine both. This led to a lot of acts that weren’t really Britpop being tagged with the name when they were nothing of the sort (Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, etc), as well as a bizarre goldrush of record labels trying to sign any four or five piece who happened to be drinking in a Camden that weekend.

One of the few acts that genuinely deserved their moment in the Britpop sunshine was Ocean Colour Scene, a West Midlands quartet whose previous record label had remixed their debut album without their consent in a cynical attempt to jump on the baggy bandwagon of the early 90s. It’s a great way to sign off a mixed bag of an album that inspires wows and indifference in equal measures.