OASIS - Dig Out Your Soul Review

Since its mid-'90s heyday, Oasis' albums—while still selling well everywhere outside the United States—have been comfortable, even pedestrian affairs, usually rescued by a couple of uncomplicated singalong stadium anthems. "Dig Out Your Soul," however, is the sound of a band rediscovering its snarl. Lead single "The Shock of the Lightning" sets the template: It may not have a chorus as such, but boy, does it make a fantastic racket in search of one. Much of the album sounds similarly wired, with songs like "Bag It Up," "Waiting for the Rapture" and "The Turning" relocating the air of menace Noel Gallagher's songwriting seemed to mislay after "Definitely Maybe." On the downside, only Liam Gallagher's Lennon-esque "I'm Outta Time" is really instant enough for drunk people to warble in fields. Still, who needs tunes when you've finally got your mojo working again?—Mark Sutherland...full text Nearly 15 years since they first swaggered and sneered their way into the public consciousness, the Gallaghers still polarise opinion like no other. Mere mention of O*s*s in a blog prompts hundreds of posts, many asking why people are still interested. The answer is simple. As bona fide rock stars, no one else has come along and, as Rio Ferdinand would put it, 'taken up the mantelpiece'. Which leaves them slightly adrift and peerless. They remain, as Alan McGee said, 'too young to be the Stones and too old to be part of that whole Libertines thing'.

Last time out, Liam declared: 'I carry madness, everywhere I go', but of late, the rock'n'roll star seems somewhat tamed and sober, getting up at 6am to go running on Hampstead Heath before dropping off the kids at school. On Definitely Maybe, the young Gallagher sang about strawberries and cream and 'lassaagnnnya'. This month, he revealed his recipe for steaming salmon in soy sauce, and how the gastropub near his second home in Henley-on-Thames is owned by Antony Worrall Thompson. He still peppers most sentences with the F-word, but now also appears on The F Word, joking with Gordon Ramsay.

Noel, meanwhile, seems to be enjoying a second youth, appearing on Radio 1's breakfast show recently, evidently still drunk, having fallen out of a rock bar in Soho only an hour or so previously....full text ""Bag It Up" could be a sequel to the Fall's take on "Mr Pharmacist" - a ramshackle speedfreak racket, Liam taking refuge from "the freaks coming up through the floor" with his "heebeegeebies in a little bag". Both "The Turning" and "Waiting For The Rapture" ride along on grinding monotone riffs, pitched somewhere between the blunt frustration of "Raw Power" and the desperation of "Gimme Shelter". Running straight into the short, sharp "Shock of the Lightning", this is a terrific sequence - urgent, wired, alive for the first time in ages."
"As you'd expect the album's packed with the Sex-Pistols-play-the White-Album material we love 'em for. The Fab-Four-alike game continues with (Get Off Your) High Horse Lady as Give Peace A Chance; the intro to Dear Prudence making up the coda to The Turning; and apparently love is a magical mystery in The Shock Of The Lightning."

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