Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul

It's hard not to be impressed with the way Noel Gallagher has managed to turn Oasis' apparently permanent state of musical stasis into a matter of class pride. "It's a working-class thing ... I'm not an experimenter," he recently remarked, as if making interesting music was an unacceptable capitulation to bourgeois mores, like joining a snooty golf club.

It's a smart bit of doublethink, but there's something depressing about this not-for-the-likes-of-us attitude, not least the sneaking feeling that Noel Gallagher - clearly a sharp and intelligent man - doesn't believe a word of it, that it's bluster designed to hide fear, the knowledge that the one time he did try to experiment, the result was Oasis's catastrophic 2000 album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. The millions of records and tickets Oasis sell must come as consolation, but you wonder if Gallagher occasionally steals a rueful glance at his former Battle of Britpop nemesis - wistfully noting, say, the critically acclaimed Mandarin opera - before going back to dutifully promoting the new Oasis album with a single that goes "love is a litany, a magical mystery" and assurances to the press that it sounds like the Beatles.

At least he can console himself that he's never going to get sued under the Trade Descriptions Act: Oasis's seventh album arrives bearing Helter Skelter drum fills, a sample from John Lennon's final radio interview, a coda to The Turning stolen from Dear Prudence and lyrical references to Lennon's Gimme Some Truth and Ian MacDonald's Fabs book Revolution in the Head. Complaining about Oasis's lyrics seems rather like shooting fish in a barrel, or as Gallagher would doubtless have it, shooting fish in a barrel/ with a man called Darryl/ singing a carol/ in American Apparel. Suffice to say there's a chorus that advises you to "shake your reptile" - Crocodile? Snake? Tortoise? - and that the younger Gallagher brother has developed a weird tic of continually reminding you that you're listening to a song, as if concerned you might think you're listening to a lecture on particle physics: "Here's a song," he offers on both I'm Outta Time and Ain't Got Nothin'.

That said, both are among the album's highlights, the former an effective exercise in shamelessly button-pushing balladry, the latter a two-minute brawl of a song, driven by an off-kilter drum pattern. It's one of a handful of moments when Dig Out Your Soul works because it does precisely what Noel Gallagher says it doesn't and experiments, at least a little, with the Oasis formula. The opening Bag It Up offers an impressively grimy, low-rent brand of freakbeat, while Falling Down is, by Oasis's standards at least, opaque and oddly delicate.

Nevertheless, the other Liam contribution, Soldier On, highlights Dig Out Your Soul's biggest problem: the mid-tempo plod that has become Oasis's default rhythmic setting. There's something trudging and weary about it, redolent of gritted teeth and furrowed brows, of labour rather than effortless inspiration. It's further compounded by a surfeit of lyrical references to having a go, sticking with it and not giving up - "You've got to keep on keeping on", "My head's in the clouds but at least I'm trying" - and by the straining mannerisms of Liam's vocals, which at their most affected sound less like bracingly abrasive sneering than the dogged exertions of a man who's a little backed up.

Oasis can still occasionally produce songs suggestive of the breezy insouciance that marked their early years - the new single The Shock of the Lightning among them - but more often on Dig Out Your Soul, they sound as though they're killing themselves trying to come up with something that'll do. And sometimes what they come up with won't do at all, as on Gem Archer's To Be Where There's Life, a song that signifies its mystical, psychedelic bent by opening with a sitar going sprrrrrroinnnnng. It's the kind of hackneyed gesture that seems to underline Oasis's reductive view of music, the nagging suspicion that, far from being steeped in the nuances of classic rock, they've only actually heard the Greatest Hits.

For more than a decade, Oasis have continued to sell millions of records while stuck in a musical holding pattern. It's a perversely impressive feat, partly down to their fans, who, depending on your perspective, are either remarkably loyal or risibly undemanding. But it's also down to Oasis' willingness to graft, dutifully touring, never declining to play the hits. Neither masterpiece nor catastrophe, more experimental than Noel would allow but no one's idea of adventurous, a lot of Dig Out Your Soul sounds like hard work, and not in the latter-day Scott Walker sense of unorthodox or avant garde. Perhaps that's fitting.



Track listing

* 1. Bag It Up



* 2. Turning



* 3. Waiting For The Rapture



* 4. Shock Of The Lightning



* 5. I'm Outta Time



* 6. Get Off Your High Horse Lady



* 7. Falling Down



* 8. To Be Where There's Life
* 9. Ain't Got Nothin'
* 10. Nature Of Reality



* 11. Soldier On (Sound clip only)