Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul Review

Digging themselves into a rut and smacking the stiff end of a shovel into those alleged souls, Oasis reaches their end. Dig Out Your Soul sounds somewhat macabre given the state of the band by this point. Commercially successful pub band standards for a frigid final outing. At least they cut this one down to under an hour. Bleeding ears for sixty minutes is no life at all. Nor is listening to Bag It Up though. Strained tones can be heard from the first distorted guitar note, the crackle as loud as ever and the vocal manipulation strung through this seeing Gallagher and Gallagher dump their presence into a deep mix of messy instrumentals. Dig Out Your Soul has no chance as the band channels the blur of at-the-time indie rock advancing far past them with Americanised influence and the whirring factors of their impending breakup.  

A perfect storm for quality then – or at least the pressure can often create diamonds. It did for their contemporaries in Blur and Pulp but little comes for this last Oasis album. Plodding and acceptable numbers are hard to pick apart because of how sloppily placed together they are. Their alternative rock presence is not much different to what was around at the time, though it is a step in a different direction from their earliest works. It is sincerely funny the growth of Oasis, even just a fractional shift of the weighty iceberg of static, empty songs, came at the end of the band’s lifespan. By this point though, the wall of sound experience on offer, it becomes clear this is just another spin on their “we love The Beatles, don’t you know?” personality bait.  

Compared to the plain toast offerings of their first two albums, the shake-up found on whirring guitar piece The Turning is a step-up in quality. Dig Out Your Soul still struggles to mount anything of merit – the likes of Waiting for the Rapture agonising for the Noel Gallagher lyrics as well as the stock sentiment which would soon rush into those High Flying Birds efforts. Even then, the Liam Gallagher championed pieces here, The Shock of the Lightning particularly, highlights the constant curse Oasis never dealt with. Their lyrics are lacklustre and Dig Out Your Soul soon serves as forgettable background noise than anything else. Repetitive closer Soldier On does not have the same charm or style as the Richard Hawley song Liam Gallagher lifts its title from. He does more of that grubby music theft on Beady Eye releases, anyway. 

This is the end of a band who, commercially, did it all. Knebworth and Oasis will forever tie themselves together, and so too will familial arguments and Dig Out Your Soul. Funnily enough, the fractures of the duo and their split cannot be heard – possibly because their work feels no influence from their personal lives. It is hard to scope out where the cracks show, either because Oasis and the experiences of their members are removed from the album, thereby making it impersonal, or because this is just how Oasis always worked. If that is the case, Dig Out Your Soul is a desperately mediocre endeavour to put to an end a plain band who caused shockwaves by being in the right place at the right time, draping a flag over themselves on the cusp of a Euro 1996 blunder.