CityLife

Album Review: Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul (Big Brother)

CityLife Rating: 4.0000 out of 5

ON paper, this is the album which marks the great leap forward for Oasis.

The band renowned at one time for chucking twice as many hooks into their songs as any other Britpop contender claims to be doing things differently.

The aim, says Noel Gallagher, was to “write music that had a groove, not songs that followed that traditional pattern of verse, chorus and middle eight”. But, seven albums in, you don’t expect Oasis to rip up a winning formula, and in many ways they don’t. The Gallaghers have not become some surly groove machine.

No, if there is a striking feature to Dig Out Your Soul, it is the degree to which Noel reasserts his songwriting authority.

Of the 11 tracks, five – all written by Noel – stand head and shoulders above the rest, and the opening four songs are as protracted a burst of brilliance as we have heard from Oasis these past 10 years.

Bag It Up scrapes into action on raw guitars and clodhopping rhythm, with shades of early Seventies psychedelia.

Then comes The Turning, simmering along on moody piano before a tidal wave of guitars crashes down on us, ebbing away to leave Doors-like organ. Noel says it is like “the Roses doing The Stooges”, but it’s much better than that.

Waiting For The Rapture has a caveman groove reminiscent of Argent’s 1972 hit Hold Your Head Up – a leaden appetiser for the surging force of The Shock Of The Lightning, the single, which has that Oasis trademark of possessing so much mass and muscle that it is the musical equivalent of an army on the march.

And then the brilliance subsides. The Liam-penned I’m Outta Time is a sweet and wistful ballad – pleasant enough but not gobsmackingly exceptional.

It contains a snippet of speech by John Lennon which is, frustratingly, so low in the mix that you can barely make out a word.

(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady is the only clunker from Noel. It certainly has the aforementioned groove – a bombastic boom-chick affair – but it’s not enough to save the song from ordinariness.

The fifth flash of Noel brilliance is Falling Down – another psychedelic period piece, its mesmeric descending chord sequence wreathed in clouds of electronica. It’s a huge, huge song, and surely a gig encore for the future.

There is no following that, and so it proves, as Dig Out Your Soul peters away with another couple more songs from Liam and a song apiece from Gem Archer and Andy Bell. Paul Taylor

Released: 06/10/2008

Reader Rating: out of 5

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