STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF GIANTS (Big Brother)

That difficult fourth album...

The champagne's run dry, and so havbe the storming tunes. What are Oasis without youth and self-belief ?

The album's not out for another month, and already the rumours have killed all expectation for Oasis's rebirth. It is, according to those who've heard advance cassettes, an absolute dog of a record. Pants, shite, total cack. Worse than 'Be Here Now'. Proof that Bonehead was the band's secret genius. The final nail in rock's mouldy coffin.

The whole point of circulating tapes to 'friends' and 'favoured journalists' weeks ahead of the release schedule is to generate word of mouth, but this wasn't quite the word of mouth Oasis's publicists had in mind. What they probably imagined was the kind of excited whispering that greeted Blur's 'Parklife' and The Verve's 'Urban Hymns', turning those albums into award-winning number ones even before they were played on the radio. What they've ended up with is a PR disaster on the scale of the Millennium Dome. (The only positive publicity the band has had recently has surrounded the births of the two Gallagher children, Lennon and Anais.)

And everything around this record has conspired to reinforce the idea that it is almost unimaginably bad: the brothers' identical feather cuts; the ratlike desertions of Bonehead and Guigsy; the title of the opening track ("Fuckin' in the Bushes"); the title of the album (another Beatles homage AND a deliberate grammatical error); the fact that Noel wrote some of the songs while on holiday in Phuket with Meg, who recorded their banal activities for a column in a downmarket Sunday paper. How could it be anything other than a second consecutive letdown by a band who once seemed genuinely to be the resurrection of rock'n'roll.

The first thing to say about 'Standing on the Shoulder of Giants' is that it's not THAT bad. It is less depressingly hollow than Be Here Now, Liam still has one of the greatest voices in contemporary rock, and Noel can still write a tune. The second thing to say about it is that it will not make anybody jump up and down with joy. It does not contain any great singles. The 'new direction' is half-baked.

If 'Definitely Maybe' was a rocket blasting off, 'Morning Glory' the are through outer space, and 'Be Here Now' the unscheduled crash-landing, then the good news is that Oasis have survived. The bad news is that they are still stumbling warily from the wreckage, and they don't seem sure where they want to go next.

The album begins weirdly, with a piledriving instrumental based on a drum loop Noel discovered while working on James Lavelle's U.N.K.L.E project. The only vocals on "Fuckin' in the Bushes" are samples from a film about the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (the title comes from an old army type who lived on the island complaining about 'Kids running around naked, fucking in the bushes!'). The song is an oddity - the rhythm track is exciting, the keyboards intriguingly ghostly, but the guitars keep peeling off into grizzly blues riffs. It desperately wants to be Jimi Hendrix meets the Chemical Brothers, and it half-succeeds. Unfortunately, it's one of the best songs on the album.

The next surfacing of what Noel quaintly refers to in interviews as 'club culture' comes on "Go Let It Out", the first single, when a disembodied voice announces 'Bring the bass' over a tinny scratching sample. Noel co-produced the album with Mark 'Spike' Stent (who has worked with Massive Attack and Bjork) in an attempt to 'make us sound more contemporary'. That sample is as crappily cosmetic as this process gets; on the whole, Stent's contribution seems positive. Sonically, this is the most interesting album Oasis have made, layered with whirring mellotrons and distorted beats.

But the point of Oasis was never imaginative production; it was youth, anger, hunger, energy, carnality and confidence. The new album, for all its inventiveness between the speakers, manifestly lacks these ingredients. he very fact that Noel saw the need to 'sound more contemporary' indicates his insecurity. The old Oasis would have spat on such nonsense.

At its worse - as on the sitar-and-spirituality pastiche "Who Feels Love?" or Liam's sweet-but-dull debut composition "Little James" the album sounds like what Oasis's critics always claimed they were: a sugarcoated, pub-rock impersonation of The Beatles. It was always a balancing act, standing on the shoulders of giants; what's happened is that Noel has made the fatal error of looking down, and, like the coyote in Roadrunner when he starts pedalling air, he's lost the belief that he can fly. Stripped of their selfbelief like this, Oasis sound pathetic at times, redeemed only by Liam's gorgeously sneering voice.

The source of this crisis in confidence is spelt out in a trio of songs about Noel's cocaine breakdown - the enjoyably decadent "Where Did It All Go Wrong?", the ballad-by-numbers "Sunday Morning Call"(both, unfortunately, sung by Noel), and the powerfully creepy "Gas Panic?", the album's outstanding moment. These tracks, with their dark, claustrophobic feel, are reminiscent of Jarvis Cocker's 'The Fear', another - if more eloquent - tale of celebrity gone sour. Indeed, Standing on the Shoulder is a lot like Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore': noirish, patchy, but not entirely disenchanting.

Elsewhere, there are two fast rockers - "Put Your Money Where Yer Mouth Is" and "I Can See A Liar" - which seem like self-conscious attempts to replicate the lean fury of 'Definitely Maybe', but which end up more like AC/DC without the saucy lyrics, and the final song, "Roll It Over", which is the most depressing of the lot, if only because Noel sees it as an indicator of the band's future sound. A soulless, weighty ballad wreathed with a gospel choir: what must Noel have thought when he heard Blur's 'Tender' last year?

As an album, then, this probably scores only five or six out of 10. What it is, really, is a reaction to the opprobrium heaped on its predecessor. Where 'Be Here Now' was overinflated, Standing on the Shoulder sounds soggy and shrivelled, like a burst balloon. it sounds like an album written and recorded in the queasy fug of a hangover. It is the morning after the cocaine night after Morning Glory.

Yet in many ways the band are on the right lines. Given a bit more time and effort this might have been the modernistic rebirth of the Gallaghers' dreams. If art were the only criterion, Oasis would surely have spent another six months in the studio - eliminating the straight steals (there are facsimiles of the riff from 'Dear Prudence' on two songs), erasing the crap rock cliches (bombastic drum fills and superfluous guitar solos), writing better lyrics and a few new killer songs - it could have been a contender.

But Oasis is a business leviathan now, as much as a rock band: the shareholders were getting panicky, a new product was needed on the shelves. And so they delivered, prematurely. This is the product, soiled and flawed. It's not as bad as you've heard, but I wouldn't rush out to buy it, all the same.

• The Guardian Album & Single Reviews - Index

c 2000 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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