When Fran Healy sings "Why did we wait so long" on "Mother," the opening song on Travis' seventh album, he could be addressing his band, which spent nearly five years between 2008's Ode to J. Smith and its 2013 follow-up, Where You Stand. The extra time off has done the band some good. Toward the end of the 2000s, Travis started to sag under their own weight, as the group slowly grew more ponderous, and while it certainly can't be said that Where You Stand is effervescent, it is more nimble than either Ode or The Boy with No Name, and it boasts a greater variety of tempos and textures, as well.

Extras offers 26 B-sides, rarities and unreleased tracks that, while far from complete (the wonderful "See Saw" is absent, for instance), is a fan's dream come true. This is a fans' album, to be sure, but for fans, the never-before-heard demos (like "Burning Sky" and "Thick As Thieves") have a certain spine-tingling effect, and the covers (like "So Sad About Us," "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "Disguises") are undeniably fun – often more so than the covers they chose to include on the proper albums. Extras is not a good introduction, to be sure, but for the converted, this is essential.

Us and Us Only picks up where Tellin' Stories left off and twists that album's virtues around. Where that record was essentially a stripped-down, straight-ahead collection, Us and Us Only dresses up the band's continually impressive songcraft in a moody atmosphere, borrowed in equal parts from Blonde on Blonde, Beggars Banquet, and the Chemical Brothers. The album unfolds in a haze of keyboards and subdued beats, and this murky veil never really lifts throughout the record, even as harmonics and acoustic guitars break through the mist every once and a while. Consequently, the album can initially seem a little amorphous, albeit intriguingly amorphous, filled with deep grooves and tantalizing sonic textures. Repeated plays reveal that Us and Us Only is merely a step below their previous high point of Tellin' Stories. If nothing is as immediately grabbing as "North Country Boy" or "One to Another," that's not a problem, since nearly every song works its charms with subtle grace and considerable muscle. "Forever" soon reveals itself as a minor masterpiece of swirling menace and swagger, while the Dylan inflections of "A House Is Not a Home" and "My Beautiful Friend" seem natural instead of grandstanding.

Released in 2002, before the band broke from Hut and moved to Indepediente, Fireworks: Singles 97-02 is, as the title indicates, 13 of Embrace's singles during that time period. Culled from three albums, The Good Will Out, Drawn from Memory, and If You've Never Been, the compilation is a good collection of what the group offered and a nice look back into late-'90s British rock. With cuts like "All You Good Good People," "I Wouldn't Wanna Happen to You," "One Big Family," and "Wonder" (plus a cover of the Schoolhouse Rock! track "Three Is a Magic Number"), Fireworks is a good choice for Embrace fans who want to relive the band's glory years without having to invest in the full albums.

For American audiences, the phenomenal worldwide success of Oasis was a little puzzling. That's because they only had part of the picture – unless they were hardcore fans, they didn't hear nearly three albums of material released on B-sides and non-LP singles. Critics and fans alike claimed that the best of these B-sides were as strong as the best moments on the albums, and they were right. None of the albums had a song that rocked as hard as "Fade Away" (cleverly built on a stolen melody from Wham!'s "Freedom"), "Headshrinker," or "Acquiesce." There was nothing as charming as the lite psychedelic pastiche "Underneath the Sky" or the Bacharach tribute "Going Nowhere"; there was nothing as affecting as Noel Gallagher's acoustic plea "Talk Tonight" or the minor-key, McCartney-esque "Rockin' Chair," nothing as epic as "The Masterplan." Most bands wouldn't throw songs of this caliber away on B-sides, but Noel Gallagher followed the example of his heroes the Jam and the Smiths, who released singles where the B-sides rivaled the A-sides. This meant many American fans missed these songs, so to remedy this situation, Oasis released the B-sides compilation The Masterplan.

Heathen Chemistry is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Oasis, released in 2002. The album was written and recorded with a back-to-basics sound with a more rock feel to it; the more crude and simple sound differs from the musical grandiosity of their previous records, Be Here Now (1997) and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000), being more comparable to their early work.

After the ludicrous props (Rolls Royce, clock, phone box) that cluttered the stage of their uncomfortable Be Here Now tour, the year 2000 saw Oasis wisely dispense with the theatrics and concentrate on being the world's greatest stadium pub rock band. And so, with just three mammoth video walls for company, they toured the stadia of the world. Big as the video screens were, there was little to see. Instead the drama, tension and entertainment of the Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants tour lay in just two simple things: the band's straight-ahead rock and Liam Gallagher's mouth. Joyously, fine examples of both were recorded when they played Wembley Stadium. Musically, Oasis make good their claims to be the biggest and the best, with "Supersonic", "Shakermaker", "Cigarettes & Alcohol" and "Live Forever" rocking like the pub classics they are.