As startling as it was to see Noel Gallagher attacked onstage last month at the Virgin Festival in Toronto, it was arguably the most exciting thing that's happened to Oasis in over 10 years. For a band that once valorized rock'n'roll stardom as a vehicle through which to escape routine day jobs, Oasis have gone about their own rock'n'roll stardom as if it were a routine day job, their last decade of recorded output amounting to a model of passionless, assembly-line predictability. And yet, the Mancunian rockers have mostly held onto their status as the People's Band despite being 14 years and several million pounds removed from their scrappy, working-class roots-- mainly because (as their concert set-lists and greatest-hits CD tracklists prove), much like their legions of fans, Oasis only want to hear songs from their first two albums, too.
No one knows exactly what compelled 47-year-old Daniel Sullivan to bodycheck Noel into his stage monitors (busting the guitarist's ribs and forcing several show cancellations in the process); one can only hope he wasn't so much a psychopath looking to off a celebrity as a concerned fan hoping to shake some life into his favorite band and literally push them back to the underdog position that inspired their most enduring anthems. But we'll have to wait another album to see if the incident instills in Noel a newfound hunger and fire; for now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's Be Here Now onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.
The precipitous quality decline in Oasis' output since Be Here Now-- whose increasingly uninspired successors make it seem not so bad in retrospect-- can be measured two ways: the ballads got more overbearing ("Little by Little", "Where Did It All Go Wrong?"), and the rockers more sluggish ("Go Let It Out", "The Hindu Times"). At the very least, Dig Out Your Soul makes inroads to redressing both issues: the lilting sea shanty "Falling Down" is Noel's most graceful balladic turn since B-side "The Masterplan", while lead single "The Shock of the Lightning" is exactly the sort of tune Oasis needs more of to stave off impending geezerdom, a hard-driving strobe-lit rocker-- complete with a rejuvenating vocal turn from Liam and a suitably Keith Moon-like drum solo from moonlighting Who drummer Zak Starkey. It could be their most robust song since "Morning Glory"; only a clunky middle eight lyric-- "Love is a time machine/ Up on the silver screen"-- keeps it from entering the highest echelons of their canon.
The song's brisk velocity makes you wonder why Noel Gallagher doesn't write in this mode more often, as it still seems to come easy to him; as usual, he runs into trouble when he tries to affix weighty themes to flimsy songs. Two songs in a row talk about "the rapture," but don't look here for any insights about the political dimensions of contemporary evangelicalism: While "The Turning" at least tries to back up its vague love-as-religious-experience imagery with some suitably stormy acid-rocked intensity (guided by Starkey's loose rhythm, a backing choir, and a repeated single-note piano stab), the Noel-sung "Waiting for the Rapture" is just a limpid cock-rock stomp speckled with the usual Beatleisms ("revolution in her head") and Lennon lifts (specifically, the guitar riff to "Cold Turkey").
Sadly, this sort of lead-footed blooze seems to be Noel's default setting now, from the opening "Fat Bottomed Girls" crunch of "Bag It Up" to the awful honky-tonk exercise "(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady". Bassist Andy Bell likewise contributes the standard-issue "Nature of Reality", a pub-rock slosh that never delivers on the promise suggested by its "Helter Skelter" intro. Guitarist Gem Archer fares better with his songwriting ration, "To Be Where There's Life", which at least hitches its Beatles reference of choice (the wiggy sitar drones of "Tomorrow Never Knows") onto a more exploratory psych-funk rhythm, coming up with the sort of hypno-pop groover the Verve forgot to write for their recent album.
But while you'd think a band seven albums into its career would outgrow its formative influences (or at least try to), the Gallaghers' Fab Four embrace feels more suffocating than ever, with Liam's "I'm Outta Time" pushing Oasis to new depths of Lennon grave-robbing: just when you're about to forgive the schmaltzy "Free as a Bird"-style arrangement and the cribbed piano chords from "Jealous Guy", they drop an actual Lennon interview sample in the fade-out (because naming his kid after the guy clearly wasn't tribute enough). While slavish Beatles idolatry has been Oasis' stock and trade since day one, the band's definitive early material at least roughed up the Fabs' pop classicism with pronounced punk, glam, shoegazer, and Madchester influences. However, over the past 10 years Oasis have gradually curbed those corrupting devices without replacing them with any new aesthetic inspiration. So all we're left with at the end of Dig Out Your Soul is a promise from Liam to "solider on"-- not because the band sounds eager to take on the next generation of Britpop revivalists, but because at this point that's all Oasis really know how to do.
