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OASIS - Dig Out Your Soul
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Written by Mark Reed
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Tuesday, 14 October 2008
It makes Be Here Now sound like a masterpiece
Every band becomes a tribute to themselves at some point. Many bands resist this with a fierce intensity think of U2's continual re-invention, Iron Maidens determination to perform sets almost entirely of brand new material but for some, they became a tribute act to themselves not within decades, but within years of their rise. Oasis became a tribute act within three and a half years of their first single.
Dig Out Your Soul (a nonsensical title, to be honest), is just another Oasis album. It's 48 minutes to so-so stadium rock music that maintains in a holding pattern their position in the world. By rote, you can tell what this album is going to be like : the first two tracks are angry-ish rock numbers but when Liam sings I got my heebie jeebies in a bag, you gotta wonder what exactly is going on. Follow up, The Turningis again, an OK cacophony that follows the template to the letter. If you like the previous couple of Oasis albums, Dig Out Your Soul is another chapter, like a mid 70's James Bond movie that offered only variations on a theme and nothing new. Same ingredients in a slightly different stew.
These Baked Beans of rock are OK. They do a job, neither amazingly brilliantly or gobsmackingly awful. Waiting For The Rapture is the typical Noel Gallagher style ballad. There are normally two songs just like this on each album. And The Shock Of The Lightning is a brilliant title for an OK five minutes. It doesn't make any inventions or try anything new, and it sounds like it could've been recorded anytime between 1968 and 2008. That said, if it came out in 1998, it's be an OK album track and probably not the first single off the record. I'm Outta Time is a fine, delicate ballad. But again, it was done better by Oasis several years ago when it was called Let There Be Love.
In the old days, you'd turn the album over to side two. And High Horse Lady is a stunning accurate pastiche of a pisspoor Beatles track squeezed out towards the end of album sessions to pad out an album. Falling Down takes the same approach but to far better effect. It bears repeated listening and is probably the best thing on here because it doesn't sound like an Oasis covers band stumped for material.
Aint Got Nothin' meanwhile, is 2.15 seconds of Oasis asking Will This Do? with guitar, drums, bass and some words. The Nature Of Reality at least sounds like it could be an intruiging debate about perception and chemical responses to stimuli and the perception of what is against what we think it is. It could take us to new worlds, explore something new, lift the lid off the conventional way of thinking. And if it had been written by Lennon, it may very well have done. But Andy Bell is no Lennon, and this song does no such thing but soldier on.
It ends, somewhat anticlimatically, with Soldier On, which does exactly that : business as usual in Oasisworld. Another couple of years, another album, another excuse to tour. There's no dynamism, no drama, no harnessing of the power of music to elevate and lift us beyond a world of supermarkets and consumer opportunities, and thus, the album peters out into a damp squib, a Blakes Seven-style anticlimax. This is Oasis making records out of habit, not artistic necessity, mistaking saying something with having something to say, and and it's time for the beast to rest and rethink where it's going next, because Oasis have painted themselves into a corner.Only registered users can write comments.
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