Randy Lewis reviews the latest album by Oasis.
OASIS
Dig Out Your Soul
Big Brother
3 stars (out of 5)
Oasis has long worn its psychedelic influences on its sleeve, and on its latest album, Dig Out Your Soul, released last week, the band often sounds as though it wishes it were 1969 all over again.
There's a forward motion to the backward glances, but the spiritual-philosophical bent of many of the songs suggests that brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher preferred the era when rock stars set out to explore the meaning of life rather than maximise the monetisation of their brand.
Noel Gallagher wrote six of the album's 11 songs - with three from Liam and one apiece from bassist Andy Bell and rhythm guitarist Gem Archer - and his are the most cryptically evocative.
The Turning references the Rapture, fallen angels and a messiah in its sense of the impending arrival of something ominous, hopeful or both.
The Shock of the Lightning might be an expression of physical or spiritual ecstasy, and its lyric "Love is a litany . . . a magical mystery" is yet another of this band's acknowledgments of its eternal debt to the Beatles.
There are likewise musical quotations from Helter Skelter, Dear Prudence and other White Album-era Fab Four songs, along with nods to the Who circa Tommy and the Stones a la 2000 Light Years From Home.
Bell's The Nature of Reality delves headlong into existential questioning, with lyrical economy that's 180 degrees from Archer's wordy To Be Where There's Life.
It all adds up to something fairly amorphous, but the band's crunching guitars and insinuating melodies provide a bracing contrast in this decade of weepy SLC (Sounds Like Coldplay) British rock.
