Dig Out Your Soul - Oasis

This is the seventh studio album from Oasis which will be released on 6th October 2008.Other versions avilable include: Super Deluxe Boxset - 2 x CD, 1 DVD, 4 Heavyweight Vinyls, 24 Page Hardback Book all in a Beautiful Shoulder Box + A Digital Download Of The Album.

A Limited Edition CD/DVD.
LP Gatefold Sleeve (2x LP Heavyweight Vinyl)

Success, Noel Gallagher concedes, is not without its drawbacks."We’ve been putting records out for fifteen years or so. You might think that, from the experience of all the records you have made, you would just swan into the studio and know how everything is going to go. But it has never been like that, at least not for us. If anything, it’s been the opposite. It just gets more and more of a challenge.”

Every great piece of work – and 'Don’t Believe The Truth' [2005] was one of them – only serves to raise the bar higher, in terms of the expectations of the audience. In the case of Oasis, who have settled into a cycle of three-year gaps between releases of new work, this sense is heightened by the fact that every new album tends to be greeted like a comeback.Any apprehensions about the quality of ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ disintegrate within fifteen seconds of the opening track ‘Bag It Up’, which has every quality of the band’s unique finger-in-the socket rock and roll. There’s a rough, defiant, exuberant edge to a lot of these songs, notably ‘The Shock Of The Lightning’, one of those songs which has the capacity to stop you in your tracks – on first, second, or fiftieth hearing – whatever you are doing. The band sound as if they are really enjoying themselves and the exuberance is contagious.

"Both ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ and ‘Bag It Up’”, Noels says, "Were written basically in the studio. If ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ sounds instant and compelling to you, it’s because it was written dead fast. And recorded dead fast. And before we knew it we were saying: ‘fucking hell: you know what, this is really good.’ I’d say it’s probably the most current song we have had on a record - ever. Because generally I would write a song, then demo it, then listen to it for months. And fuck about with it. Whereas ‘The Shock of The Lightning’ basically is the demo. And it has retained its energy. And there’s a lot to be said for that, I think. The first time you record something is always the best.”

There’s a 1961 British film comedy called, Raising The Wind, in which music students Kenneth Williams and Leslie Phillips are lectured on the key elements in composing popular tunes. "Now remember,” their teacher tells them. "It goes like this: Verse, chorus; verse, chorus; clever bit; verse, chorus. But never two clever bits. Or it don’t work.”‘

Dig Out Your Soul’, maybe more than any previous Oasis albums, deviates from the orthodox approach to songwriting. "I made a conscious decision,” Noel says, "not to write what you could call Songs with a capital S. I wanted to write music that had a groove; not songs that followed that traditional pattern of verse, chorus and middle eight. I wanted a sound that was more monotonous, more hypnotic even; more driving. Songs that would draw you in a different way. Songs that you would maybe have to connect to - to feel. And that is probably the biggest progression, from ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’”.

It’s a quality that resonates through pretty well every track on this CD, magnificently on Gem Archer’s composition, ‘To Be Where There’s Life’.

‘Dig Out Your Soul’, I suggest to Gallagher, marks a departure from Oasis’s history in other ways. Whereas 'Definitely Maybe' [1994] and '(What’s The Story) Morning Glory' [1995] were essentially glorious, uncontrolled explosions made by boys, this is an album made by men. A carefully paced collection, its lyrics, in the slower songs especially, are more reflective: almost to the point of bleakness. "I wouldn’t say the lyrics are bleak in a personal sense,” Noel says, "but they are bleak in a sense of addressing the way the world is now. There’s no point acting like you’re 24 when you’re 40. Listening back to the final mixes, I was saying, God is mentioned a lot. And angels. And devils. All kinds of Biblical references. And fuck knows where that came from.”

"You do tackle the big questions on this record,” I suggest to Noel, "Like on track two, ‘The Turning’; a curious mixture of hope and disillusion”. "I think the world is at a critical point; like an elastic band, where it’s either going to snap, or people are going to come to their senses. There are only extremes. And ‘The Turning’ is kind of about … what hope do we have of recovering; what hope do we have of getting this back?”

This CD is reflective (‘Waiting For The Rapture’), mischievously retro [‘(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady’ has its roots in Tommy Tucker’s High Heel Sneakers] and breathtakingly vibrant: ‘The Shock Of The Lightning’ may be the most ‘conventional’ Oasis song on the album, and the one that will be the first to hit FM radio in the US, but it is also absolutely stunning.

The album ends with a beautifully understated, strangely haunting song called ‘Soldier On’. It reminds me of a 2008 version of ‘Take This Hammer’. Noel says, "It was a demo that had been lying around in the studio; everybody had forgotten about it. All we had to begin with was this tiny little section, with a drum accompaniment and one verse. We worked on it, and bashed it out in one night.”

"It would have been easier, and more obvious, to put an uplifting song at the end of the album. When I hear ‘Soldier On,’ I imagine a guy with a big fucking rope and lump of concrete on his back: as if someone has told him right – there’s your baggage. Take it through your life, that’s why it was last on the album. I really, really love that song.”In 2002, when Oasis released 'Heathen Chemistry', Noel says, "I thought it was only a third of the way to the place we wanted to be with this band. I feel that 'Don’t Believe The Truth' got us half way, and that Dig Out Your Soul gets us to the place where I feel we are all really comfortable, both with each other, and where we’re at. There is no need to write, like, orthodox pop songs any more, just for the sake of it. We just write what we like and we just do what we do. Because you sit down and you say to yourself: well, why do you do this? Answer: because I fucking love it. Would I rather do anything else? No."

”With 'Dig Out Your Soul', Oasis have recorded their most bold, ambitious and varied album ever. And they’ve just raised that bar another twelve notches.

Robert Chalmers
May 2008