Oasis Live Review: The Gallaghers Reunite, Their Songs Still Stomping and Wounds Still Healing

It was a few songs into Oasis’s first concert in 16 years and — despite the heavy anticipation, the rabid fan attention, the relief of simply seeing the Gallagher brothers walk onstage together, Liam’s left arm draped over Noel’s shoulder — there was something still tentative in the air at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday night. A crowd of 62,000 fans was vibrating, and cheering and singing along, but still waiting for license to rage.

Liam, the band’s frontman and the punchier of the two brothers — Noel, the songwriter and guitarist, is far more dour — seemed to sense the dryness.

Turn around, he told the audience. Find someone and throw your arms around them. Hold them tight, he said. Then the band finally located its detonator.

That was “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” from its mighty, snarling 1994 debut album, “Definitely Maybe.” The guitars started at maximum sleaze, and Liam began singing the lyrics — about all the fun ways to tune out when life gets boring — with real brio. The crowd, especially down on the stadium floor, began ecstatically hopping in place in little rugby scrums, then erupted out of them as the band peaked at the chorus. Finally, everyone had shaken off their nerves.

For around two hours, Oasis — perhaps the most meaningful and popular British band of the 1990s, and certainly the rowdiest and most fun — toggled back and forth between masculinist ecstasy and a sometimes fumbling search for it in a frills-free and dogged performance. At times, it was pure triumph, the grandest pub singalong fathomable. At other moments, it was a ramble in the dark.