Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 30/5/05
Label: Big Brother

Listening to Oasis has always been a little like playing the audio round in a pub quiz - trying to place familiar riffs, arrangements and lyrics without quite being able to identify the original. On "Don't Believe The Truth" (catalogue number RkidCD30x - 'Our kid', geddit?), eleven years and five albums on from the altogether more subtly Beatles-inspired "Definitely Maybe", it has all become significantly easier, if a lot less fun.

The entire album is decorated with the world-weary jangle of former Oasis support act Travis, most notably on the Noel-yodelled "Part Of The Queue" which manages to evoke both "Love Will Come Through" and The Stranglers' smack anthem "Golden Brown". "Mucky Fingers" is an audacious-even-for-Oasis steal of "Waiting For The Man" (while the title of course invokes the Stones' "Sticky Fingers"), the verses of "Lyla" borrow "Street Fighting Man", "Love Like A Bomb" is like a Ben Folds ballad sung by a drunk and the breakneck, under two-minute "The Meaning Of Soul" bizarrely sounds more like Oasis-imitators BRMC than Oasis themselves.

"Guess God Thinks I'm Abel" (wordplay which may as well be a typo, having no bearing on the lyrical content otherwise) is like a mildly aggressive Crowded House track, "A Bell Will Ring" recalls Noel's Beatles-aping Chemical Brothers tracks gone rock - which is surely the very definition of 'pop will eat itself' - and finally "Let There Be Love" is a rasped "Imagine" with vocals from both brothers that goes a bit yee-haw (literally).

Only two tracks divert from the road more travelled. "The Importance Of Being Idle" is an oddity, an oom-pah-pah Noel song about nothing that sounds like it took less time to write than it does to listen to, while "Keep the Dream Alive" is almost indescribable, an epic, everything-but-the-kitchen sink arrangement that renders a mere slip of a song with a la-la-la coda into a stadium behemoth while remaining utterly unmemorable.

(Evermore idiot-savant lines from Noel litter his lyrics - "I'm not your keeper/I don't have the key/I got a piano/I can't find the C", "Turn Up The Sun"; "You get your history from the Union Jack", "Mucky Fingers"; "I sold my soul for the second time/'Cause the Man, he don't pay me", "The Importance Of Being Idle" - while Liam's words roughly amount to "I'm fit", "I fancy you", and "'Ave it!", which is as it should be.) The end result of the pilfering is that, overall, it's Oasis' least Oasis-sounding album.

The '70s stomps still crop up and Liam's sneer maintain continuity but it's otherwise a schizophrenic record that flits between almost-folky solos and rattling rock-outs, like the Foo Fighters' forthcoming "one loud, one not so loud" double album on random. As musically competent and beautifully-produced as this record undeniably is, strip the vocals and you'd be hard-pushed to identify it as being an Oasis album or enjoy it accordingly.

The brand is bigger than the band, which is just as well because about the only identity lacking from "Don't Believe The Truth" is that of Oasis themselves.

    by Emma Morgan