Almost fifteen years after their off-kilter, watershed, and unceremonious split in a Parisian backstage, it’s hard to overstate the amount of influence, longing, and nostalgia English rock band Oasis has propagated in its aftermath. Although most of the attention and money on the heels of their disbandment revolved around shoehorning an improbable reunion by way of reconciling the Gallagher Bros’s insurmountable differences, the britpop marquee fixture’s creative footprint has found boundless ways to permeate inspiratory wells of lots of contemporary acts in its wake—both within and outside the immediate confines of rock and roll.

It could be contended that two latter-day quintessential offshoots of such a musical lineage would be fellow Mancunian indie rockers Shader on the one hand, and Tacoma, Washington-based Enumclaw on the other. Aside from how their music rings and shreds (more on this below), both foursomes sport self-evident signs of worshipping association with their spiritual grandfathers—the shared stomping ground coupled with a parka-punk antic in the former group’s case, the “best band since Oasis” biography tagline for the latter. Yet the apparent similarities between these outfits should theoretically end there.

That is, geographically and socio-economically, the band members’ upbringings and backgrounds could not be more different from each other, at least at first glance. For starters, a planet-sectioning 4,650 miles/7,500 km separate the primordial soups from within which Shader and Enumclaw sprouted. If the artistic extrapolation borrowed from Oasis’s industry-changing sound and aesthetic is more than comprehensible in the Manchester natives’ case, it does require a more substantial cognitive leap for the American Fat Possum Records signees. Not unrelatedly, as the advent of geographically distributed and interconnected nodes of connection went on to annul even the stealthiest of outstanding barriers, a cultural dynamic directly stemming from Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities ensued.

With both acts properly soaked and hard-boiled in guitar-led no frills indie rock—one wouldn’t be too far off in picturing them with a sprinkle of mid-Naughties emo sensibilities on top—their musical crossover pushes past the high regard they each hold the britpop icons in. Refreshingly in the present climate, virtually every creative component baked into each of their collections of songs to date is built in order to thrust the guitar as the lead protagonist instrument, rather than blink-and-you-miss it-bit part in much of today’s tired rock canon. Sticky intro riffs, slews of parallel melodic riffs, main vocal dynamics atop of consonant arpeggios: these all revolve around six-strings, not unlike a certain giant band from the 90s.

However, perhaps Shader and Enumclaw’s most appeasing and earnest value is found in their unabashed and dejected adoption of true blue, tried and true pop rock songwriting formulas. Without ever incurring the risk of coming across as one-dimensional, their verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus song-crafting method is of an endearing textbook execution. This results in multiple cuts on either of their debut studio LPs Save the Baby and Everything Is Connected sounding handily and seamlessly like they could sneak into each other’s tracklist without anyone batting an eye (take Shader’s “There Was a Time“, “Time Is Right” as well as “Runaway“—or conversely, their US counterparts’ uncanny sonic adjacency of “Cowboy Bebop” and “Jimmy Neutron“).

Lest we lose our trail of thought here—both quartets wear their singular strain of britpop influence proudly on their sleeves. Hence, the notion that significant portions of their studio-grading recordings come across like they could be covering each other isn’t exactly an affront to the Pepsi test. Yet the set of coincidences start to run deep as soon as one realizes that their aforementioned long-gestated debut projects came out within the span of two weeks of each other, across mid to late October last year. Even more surreally, both bands enlist a member whose surname spells Edwards, and watch this: they both play bass.

We’ll spare you some of the most surface-level traits that could be thrown into the set of explanatory variables in a hypothetical regression analysis indexing Shader and Enumclaw’s interconnected output. Attributing their similarity to the shared frigid and rainy climate, their regions’ insular isolationism from their respective country’s centers of power, or simply their comparable latitude levels leave a lot to be desired. We would rather invite you to delve into the sonic material to make head or tails of this improbable kinship alongside the North England-Washington state axis. Start with—and for now, stick to—their inaugural full length albums: while there is about an additional ten minutes of runtime on the English indie rockers’ project (46 minutes packed into twelve records, versus Enumclaw’s 36 in eleven), there is an immediacy of impact whose deduction is undeniable.

There is something uniquely glamorous and affable in how Oasis presents itself as the center of a phantasmagoric venn diagram between a band hailing from the industrious and sullen birthplace of grunge music, and another cut from the working class cloth of a sanctuary as stricken by its secondary economic sector heritage as it is placed on the global artistic map by the force of post-punk. If anything, such disparate premises speak to the gelling power and impact of the enterprise the Gallaghers created—while it might be true that no check can be fat enough for Noel to acquiesce to a forced industry-planted reunion, for now their musical legacy rests in good reincarnated hands.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

Below listed are Shader’s complete works since 2020:

Shader

Studio albums
Everything Is Connected (2022)

Singles
Streets Tell Stories (2021)
Runaway (2021)
Don’t You (Forget About Me) [2020]
True to Life (2020)
Lately (Demo) [2020]
Time Is Right (2020)
Be My Saviour (2020)

Below listed are Enumclaw’s complete works since 2021:

Enumclaw

Studio albums
Save the Baby (2022)

EPs
Jimbo Demo (2021)

Singles
2002 (2022)