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.
