Oasis wants to be the biggest band in the world. Over the course of the year, they have spread their establishment sneer over Keane and Jay-Z. On Jay-Z’s headlining of Glastonbury, Noel Gallagher (guitar, vocals, songwriting) said to BBC News, “Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music. … I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong.” Rap’s ambassador responded by opening his set with a glib performance of Oasis’s iconic “Wonderwall” to a crowd that sang every word.
It should be no surprise that Jay-Z would come out on top considering his career is built on charisma and Oasis’s career based on non-confrontational, distorted rock cliches. On Dig Out Your Soul, Oasis’s insistence on utilizing every overdone rock technique and sounding best as arena background music (the first single, “The Shock of the Lightning,” was featured on Monday Night Football) jeopardizes any relevance that British rock’s old guard may have had in the 21st century.
Oasis has been compared to The Beatles so much throughout their career, it is not even funny. Oasis has continually and unabashedly paid homage to (read: ripped off) the fab four and has gotten away with it by releasing multi-platinum record after multi-platinum record. On Dig Out Your Soul, you can play “spot the Beatles reference” on every track. “The Turning” concludes with the guitar line of “Dear Prudence;” “To Be Where There’s Light” finds Oasis pretending they were taught by Ravi Shankar; “Waiting For the Rapture” is a redo of “Yer Blues” and “The Nature of Reality” plays with the “Helter Skelter” opening riff and a few tired blues bars. This list excludes the blatant and eye-roll-inducing Beatles nods like the Lennon interview clip needlessly used on “I’m Outta Time” and a lyric about how love is “a magical mystery” on “The Shock of the Lightning.”
Speaking of what love is, Oasis has some driveling platitudes for you. On the first single they proclaim, “Love is a time machine/ Up on the silver screen,” which is probably not true, because it is also meaningless. On “Bag It Up” they deliver more smug lyrics like “I got my hee-bee-jee-bees in a hidden bag/ Tell me what you desire and we’ll bag it up, high.” These lines would be forgivable if they weren’t being shouted as anthems for crowded arenas to learn and shout back.
One could tell you about Oasis’s unique ad-hoc songwriting, but the band members are all heading in the same musical direction: higher, not forward. One could have also written about the bittersweet and larger-than-life vocals, but that is old news.
The one caveat to this characterization of Dig Out Your Soul is the slow-burning, laconic “Soldier On,” which does not sound like The Beatles or even Oasis. It succeeds as a surreal death march by capturing the ambivalent and confused atmosphere of today’s war-weary West. If the rest of the album dared to be as modern or as innovative as this track, Oasis could have made the move toward a more relevant and original sound, instead of collecting more jock jams.
2 stars out of 5.
