Oasis were once the biggest rock group on the planet, shattering sales records and selling out stadia, their every embarrassing interpersonal dust-up chronicled in scathing detail by British tabloids. But while they may have been the biggest, they were far from the best. Hell, Oasis weren't even the best Britpop band. It's as though they succeeded solely by their own notorious conviction that they were the Beatles' rightful successors.

But all things end, and as the bloated Be Here Now hit stores in 1997 at the height of their popularity, they settled in for the backlash, which, eight years later, is still in full force. Or close to it, anyway-- I've read several write-ups of their latest album, Don't Believe the Truth, that struggle to explain why it's a return to form from their last two miscarriages, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and Heathen Chemistry. Unfortunately, these reviews are either based on wishful thinking or plain bad taste. If anything, Don't Believe the Truth is the chilling conclusion to their discography's trilogy of shame.

It's difficult to define what a return to form would be for Oasis. In hindsight, Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory aren't much more than competent albums that managed to score a handful of genuinely triumphant, anthemic singles-- and Don't Believe the Truth certainly falls well short of the high-water mark those records set for the band. A decidedly scattershot affair, the new record only exceeds the sum of its parts for a few fleeting moments.

There are a lot of reasons this album doesn't gel, not least that Liam Gallagher now sounds like a singing anti-smoking campaign, and the brash, snotty arrogance that once sold "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Champagne Supernova" is crushed out by his gruffness. When brother Noel sings (which he often does), he's so obviously dispassionate about the project that he seems to disappear completely. Worse still, the band's non-Gallaghers are content to act as tired session musicians, even when they're writing the songs. Gem Archer wrote one and Andy Bell contributed two, but you'd never know without the liners, as they're totally indistinguishable from Noel's uninspired castoffs. Weirdly, the track that seems least like a Noel tune is actually one he wrote: "Part of the Queue" sounds like something off Doves' Lost Souls, if not quite up to that band's standards.

"Mucky Fingers" is also a relative departure for the band, sounding roughly like the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man" stripped of all personality and topicality. Not that topicality has ever been an Oasis strength. They've always leaned on ambiguity and the easy rhyme in their lyrics (I suppose in the reach for universality), and there's no indication that's going to change. Check Liam's "Love Like a Bomb", where he does his best John Lennon while sneering the decidedly un-Lennonesque lines, "You turn me on/ Your love's like a bomb/ Blowin' my mind."

Thankfully, they've tossed in a couple of worthwhile tracks to salvage the record from the junkheap, chief among them "The Importance of Being Idle", which, though never quite as promising as its title suggests, has a pleasant music hall bounce to it and one of Noel's better vocals. Liam's "Guess God Thinks I'm Abel", meanwhile, offers a rare instance of Oasis handing us a melody rather than slamming us over the head with it-- and it even shockingly refrains from capitalizing on the title's obvious pun, a huge plus. Sadly, strong melodies are in short supply elsewhere on Don't Believe the Truth, and what little they've drudged up are largely sunk by utilitarian arrangements.

Incidentally, you may have heard that Ringo Starr's kid, Zak Starkey, has become a member of Oasis for this record. It's a great publicity stunt for the band, and it's even partly true-- Starkey contributed his drumwork to a couple of these tracks (the rest are hammered out by faceless session dudes). The presence of Beatle offspring at the kid, however, only heightens the surrealism of Oasis' idol worship, and does nothing for them musically.

So I suppose, in the end, the best that can be said of Don't Believe the Truth is that it is a slight improvement over their previous two studio efforts, and that they at least had the sense to scrap the recordings they made with Death in Vegas and return to a simpler, more traditional sound. But regrettably, their adherence to what they do best only helps so much: When I found out that Oasis had a new album on the way, my reaction was "they're still together?" I still can hardly believe it, and given their disinterested performances here, it would seem neither can they.

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