STANDING ON THE SHOULDER OF GIANTS (Big Brother)

Whatever happened to the likely lads? Oh, whatever happened to you? Who'd have predicted Oasis' transformation into dependable middleweight rockers mired in music's middle ages?

The title to Oasis' fourth album offers a grammatically challenged take on a quote from Sir Isaac Newton. When Noel Gallagher spotted the quotation on a £2 coin after hours in a boozer, as well as writing 'shoulder' instead of 'shoulders' he labelled his notes not 'album title', but 'a bum title'

The turn of the decade. The dream is most definitely over. With the rock A-list busying themselves with children and country piles, the not-so-young generation wonder what to do when you've taken the drugs, been to the festivals and bought the attractive yin-and-yang stash box. A good time, then, for Oasis to come up with the album of the year. The year, of course, being 1970.

The group who turned 1995 into 1965 are back again. And what are they doing now that a new millennium has swept away the detritus of the past? They are, naturally enough, doing their best to sweep the nation back to a decade that first dawned 30 years ago - a time of nightly electricity blackouts, IRA bombs and the lumbering world of the 'supergroup'.

"Fuckin' in The Bushes", the instrumental that opens 'Giants', even samples dialogue from a documentary about the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival, the five-day blow-out that caught Hendrix and Jim Morrison just before their deaths and came to symbolise the final waning of British hippy hopes.

Powered by a coruscating Led Zep-esque riff and Alan White's looped duplication of a Hendrix drum roll, this intro could well have beaten the path to a battered, bleeding, insane rockn'roll circus of a record. Perhaps actually having the new Andy Bell-equipped Oasis MkII down at the studio might have spurred Noel on to make that record. But 'Standing On The Shoulder of Giants' isn't it.

When, after 'Be Here Now', it became apparent that Noel had over-estimated the public's willingness to embrace fatuous cocaine bilge, all talk was of a stripped-back, experimental rebirth. Well, little else about their return has gone to plan either. Installing Mark 'Spike' Stent, the producer of Mansun's 'Six' to achieve a 'less over-produced sound'? Choosing Wembley sodding Stadium for their return gigs? Putting six-string maestro Bell on bass?

So, rather than the promised scorched-earth policy, we get a spot of gentle pruning. Instead of getting deconstructed, Oasis now return virtually unreconstructed. Over the course of this album's 47 minutes, you will be exhorted to let it in, let it out and roll it over. You will hear backwards guitars and that 'Dear Prudence' chord sequence proudly presented like new aural discoveries. You will be fleetingly excited and then, less fleetingly, disappointed.

Initial signs are promising, with second track "Go Let it Out" living up to the intro's promise. Riding on a crunching groove that suggests The Beta Band covering "Columbia", liam is cast as a New Age thug-god offering peace'n'luv with menaces. Better still is "Gas Panic", a huge psychedelic stormcloud that releases a mix of dread and euphoria. Both revive and update the dark, bluesy undertow that once made oasis so unmissable. These are, though, only glimpses of the album they could have made. Rather than sounding like stadium gods in the mould of Led Zeppelin and The Who, long stretches of '...Giants' evoke their era's unmourned mixture of concrete bleakness and garish daffiness: longhairs in army-issue greatcoats mooching around the Builring; George Best gazing melancholically through the glass walls of his purpose-built house. True, the songs might be shorter and better than their immediate forebears, but half are still hysterically epic enough to close most people's albums. It is indeed music for supergroups, albeit one featuring ex-members of Heavy Stereo and Hurricane #1 rather than Traffic and The Small Faces. It's in this vein - as a rockkitsch artefact - that this album needs to be viewed. And, as such, it's kind of alright.

The prettily crystalline "Who Feels Love?" and Liam's first credit "Little James" are post-hippy ballads that dare to go where, erm, Crispian Mills has gone before. "Put Yer money Where Yer Mouth Is" and "I Can See A Liar" are grunting rockers that echo the denim-clad likes of Golden Earring and Spooky Tooth.

So far, so pleasingly gonzo. But then the second half is derailed by two lagging Noel-sung balladsby-numbers - "Where Did It All Go Wrong?" (the chorus even half-inching Weller's 'Sunflower') and "Sunday Morning Call". Now, at last, the youth of today can relive what it was like hanging around waiting for punk to happen.

Closer "Roll it Over" rams home the sunset-over-Albion mood by raiding two 1969 radio faves. Thunderclap Newman's 'Something in The Air' for the bridge and The BeatLes 'Come Together' for the solo - for a convincing enough conclusion. But to what? Time was when new Oasis records were traffic-stopping events. This feels about as momentous as chatting about old times down the local pub with Likely Lads Bob and Terry. Comfortable, even enjoyable, but underscored by the faintly depressing feeling that things should have turned out rather better than they did. "I can't record another big rockn'roll album," Noel declared after the last LP. "It'd bore the tits off you and it'd bore the tits off me." With 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants', we might as well accept the fact that he can't, won't - perhaps shouldn't - do anything else.

3 out of 4

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c 2000 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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