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Stone Roses, Ash, Blur
Reprise
Oasis: Dig Out Your Soul
- Rock/Alternative
- 2008
- Buy the CD
Reviewed by Jim Washington
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J
ust in time for Halloween, it’s the new Oasis album! Actually it’s only the first song on Dig Out Your Soul that could possibly be seen as having an All Hallow’s Eve theme, with lines like “the freaks are rising up through the floor” and “I got my heebie jeebies in a hidden bag.” But maybe that’s a reach. No, the real scary thing is how far Oasis has fallen since its morning glory days. This is the new, if not improved Oasis, as opposed to the brash British kids who took their love of the Beatles to the top of the pop landscape in the ’90s with the albums Definitely Maybe and What’s the Story (Morning Glory). Since then it’s been pretty much diminishing returns, as band members came and went around the battling Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel. One of the things they used to fight about, presumably, was control of the band. Noel wrote all the songs, and Liam sang them.
These days, Noel doesn’t run the show quite as much as he used to. In the new Oasis, other people get to write songs, too. And they have taken their Beatles fetish to absurd lengths by actually recruiting Zak Starkey, Ringo’s son, to play drums. To be fair, the band’s last album, 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth, had some okay moments, and a bit of the old bluster, and Dig Out Your Soul does not completely abandon that momentum. The sound is still big and loud, more Who and T. Rex than Beatles and Smiths. The best songs, including Noel’s “The Shock of the Lightning” and “Waiting for the Rapture,” have a stomping bravado.
Oasis lyrics have always been pretty much nonsense, but it was always cool nonsense about helicopters and supernovas and wonder walls, and serious questions like “Where we you while we were getting high?” On Dig Out Your Soul, those Halloween lyrics are about par for the course, and lines such as the ones in “(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady” (the next line, predictably is “I don’t need a ride tonight”) are about as good as it gets. If you’re looking for a return to form from Oasis, keep looking. But if you might be satisfied with an okay album from a once-great band, by all means check it out.
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