I'm always surprised how much love Roll It Over gets amongst Oasis fans.

A top 10 noughties moment for me...

10. Little By Little
9. Where Did It All Go Wrong?
8. The Turning
7. The Hindu Times
6. Fuckin' In The Bushes
5. Go Let It Out
4. Falling Down
3. The Shock Of The Lightning
2. Gas Panic!
1. The Importance Of Being Idle

Go on, then:

1. The Importance of Being Idle
                                                                   (1.5: The Hindu Times Demo)
2. Go Let it Out
3. Songbird
4. Falling Down
                                                                   (4.5: Where Did it All Go Wrong? Demo)
5. Fuckin' in the Bushes
6. Roll it Over
7. Stop Crying Your Heart Out
8. Gas Panic!
9. I'm Outta Time
10. The Turning / Let's All Make Believe / Who Put the Weight of the World on my Shoulders? / Shout it Out Loud / TSOTL / Part of the Queue / Who Feels Love? / Etc, etc. 

"The Turning" does make it for official releases, then!

But, it would be grouped with those solid group of tunes at the end all of which could take tenth place depending on my mood; they're all enjoyable, but don't stand out from each other like the first nine do.

The first seven and those two demos are the only ones I truly put up there with vintage Oasis. 

I fucking love the demo version of The Hindu Times.

I salivate over the thought of a Stent-produced studio version of it, faster and more arranged, with a second verse and sang by Liam. It's the last time the band could've come out with something that truly captures the same intense, driven, ringing power that was present on things like "Supersonic" or "Bring it on Down", for me.

The studio version is fine, but too safe. 

I stand by my opinion that Noel should have hit the brakes when the band took on new members and a new ethos at the turn of the century. Giants is half a great album rushed out with fillers. He should've taken more time to gather tracks for the comeback of Oasis, and waited until late-2001-ish to return with an album which includes the material from Heathen Chemistry which clearly has it's roots in the same creative soil as Giants:

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
1. Fuckin' in the Bushes
2. Go Let it Out
3. Who Feels Love?
4. Little by Little
5. The Hindu Times [Demo Mix + Liam]
6. Gas Panic!
7. Where Did it All Go Wrong? [Demo Mix + Liam]
8. Stop Crying Your Heart Out
9. Let's All Make Believe
10. Roll it Over

Add a couple of Teotihuacan excerpts as interludes to flesh it out (that's a great instrumental, should've been saved) and you've got a record which gives you everything you need: the singles, the new sound, the cohesion and consistency. Instead, we have one album with great sounds and album tracks, but no singles, and an album with big safe singles but not much else to go back to around that. But both records have some great moments.

The Turning isn't even the greatest song on DOYS. It's got a good groove and all, but it doesn't have the energy of TSOTL or Bag It Up or the pathos of Falling Down. (Just noticed the up/down contrast there. Nice.) I'd rank it about even with I'm Out Time, which is also really good but not great.

No, of course, you're absolutely right; to go further, the universe is almost certainly deterministic at classical level, and everything that did happen is the only thing that ever really could have! "The Hindu Times" and "Stop Crying Your Heart Out", as you say, might not have been written in any form at all had events been somehow different, which would ultimately require the Big Bang to have been somehow different fourteen billion years ago, ha.

In that sense, every hypothetical is equally as plausible and implausible as every other; all imagined past events are and always were impossibilities. We could colour that point in and say that is literally just as plausible, for instance, that Julius Caeser had written "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" as it is that Noel Gallagher would have written it for this delayed Giants. But of course, that doesn't jam with our everyday sense of plausibility. So, philosophically speaking (about, erm, Oasis tracklists), the real thing I'm gesturing at is the kind of album we might have gotten if Noel had taken more time to gather songs/singles for the fourth record. In the interests of that, while aware that it's all a nonsense, I'll defend some of the plausibility like this:

1. The common ground between Giants and Heathen Chemistry.
I'd say it's fairly clear that the two albums are linked in a more tangible way than a lot of successive albums. Several songs from the Heathen Chemistry era were either fully written or have roots in the Giants period (Little by Little, Force of Nature, Idler's Dream, etc), and it's also clear from the songs I'm including here themselves that a common sound/vision/creative space was shared between the two records. "Little by Little", for instance, with it's mournful lyrics and almost-futuristic soundscapes is pure 2000-Noel, while the dark churn and drum loops of "The Hindu Times - Demo" is clearly not something born to be put alongside "She is Love".

You're right that you could mash any two successive albums from any band and go "here's what they shoulda done!", but I'd argue that there's more connective tissue between these two than most. Noel was clearly still in the same creative groove between them up to a point (the point where he checked the sales figures, for example), so I think it's less insane to think he could've rode that a little further to the same songs in 2001 than, say, some combination of Don't Believe the Truth and Dig Out Your Soul. 

2. There's only one truly time-bending song in my tracklist.
"Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is the only song on my fantasy version which has no connection to the Giants years, since everything else had something written for it by that point. Noel had the riff for "The Hindu Times" and the song is clearly based around that, so again, I don't think it's wildly implausible to imagine him finishing off the song along the same lines if more time was taken for the record. Everything else there was written in time. Admittedly, "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is the biggest single there and would in a sense decide the fate of the record, and on that one I must plead guilty, or revert back to Point One. I'd be fine swapping in a shorter, faster, Liam-sang version of "Sunday Morning Call" for it. 

Overall, the one real change here is that Noel should have realised the full import of the fourth studio album, and taken the time to nail it more properly. Am I right in saying that he was calling songs like "I Can See a Liar" rubbish even at the time? If so, again, I think it's within reasonable plausibility to imagine him hitting the brakes around parts of the album, realising more gestation was needed, and ending up with a record roughly around what I presented. At the end of the day, we're left exactly where we started, dreaming our lives away while sitting with two yin-and-yang albums: one with the great sound and the great album tracks, and one with the big singles and the promotable nature. I suppose it's natural to yearn to fit them together, even if you're right that it's never going to be truly plausible enough to satisfy.

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Anyway, "The Turning" is solid and good! I shall try not to derail positive threads with my nonsense.

I've moved the discussion over to here: live4ever.proboards.com/post/1744470/thread

And yeah 'The Turning' is great, everyone keep listening to it, peace and love.

I wish each chorus had the impact of that one does. There's something lacking in the others that stops it being a single.