Oasis: ‘Dig Out Your Soul’

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Oasis’ best records should be heard in bars, with lots of people talking and a game on the television. Its giant planes of guitar sound and Liam Gallagher’s slow-motion nasal burr — one of the great British sounds — complement the petty emotions and electronic hum that surround us in public places; the songs’ lyrics, trivial and social, keep time sliding along. Any bar will do, though Oasis albums since “Standing on the Shoulder of Giants,” from 2000, might go better in a wine bar. The songs would fit the clientele: slower, more self-conscious, less invincible.

But “Dig Out Your Soul,” the group’s seventh studio album, should be heard in a really good stereo showroom: an extraordinary one with high-end stuff, and where the salesmen might let you have beer and chips while you listen. Produced by Dave Sardy, the record is an interior trip, rich with guitar and voices and organs and keyboards, some of the sonic layers scuffed and some clear as water. You get the full measure of the sound because the songs stay in single chords for longer. It’s an expensive record valorizing the drone.

It sounds so good; really, it sounds better than it is. Noel Gallagher, the band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, wrote half the album and the best of its droney tracks: “Bag It Up,” “The Shock of the Lightning,” “(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady.” They all go down in the first half, and they’re not fascinating; they don’t particularly show off his skill for the unexpected chord change. As ambitious as it is in the experience of sound and groove, “Dig Out Your Soul” is unambitious in songwriting content.

It’s derivative too — mostly, and unsurprisingly, of the Beatles, the Gallaghers’ favorite band. There are small echoes of many post-“Revolver” Beatles songs: sharp, pinpointed references, specific sounds on specific guitar chords, piano figures, and drum rhythms played by Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr’s son. (A nearly inaudible clip of a John Lennon interview, from shortly before his death, rustles through the background of Liam’s ballad “I’m Outta Time.”) But it doesn’t stop at the Beatles: “High Horse Lady” welds David Essex’s “Rock On” and Tommy Tucker’s “High Heel Sneakers.”

These songs are heavy with thoughts about time. They’re mildly philosophical, but not so spiritual that they would make you put down the beer and chips. “The Nature of Reality” is, offhandedly, about the nonexistence of objective truth. And “Soldier On,” with its endless-march feeling borrowed from the end of “I Am the Walrus,” is pure stiff-upper-lip: “Who’s to say that you were right and I was wrong/Soldier on/Come the day, come the night, I’ll be gone/Soldier on.”