Pretty good reason to be acting cocky

The secret to enjoying any Oasis album made after 1995 is to listen to it only in the six months after it comes out. During that time, anyone who listens to it will declare it “brilliant,” and after that anyone who listens to it will declare it “another crap Oasis album.”

Is Dig Out Your Soul another Oasis album made after 1995? Yes. But it has so much of the Gallagher brothers’ confident charm it’s difficult not to embrace it.

The album opens with the spirit Oasis are famous for: They’re creating an epic, and they know it.

“Bag It Up,” the opener, drips of dirty blues with a trippy swagger. The song segue ways perfectly into the second track “The Turning,” which has a euphoria Oasis hasn’t conjured since their 1994 debut Definitely Maybe.

But while the songs on Definitely Maybe were euphoric because of their innocent yearning and imitations of the British Invasion’s catchiest bands, “The Turning” is euphoric because Oasis are so confident in their own perfection it seems impossible not to get caught up in it.

After that, “Waiting for the Rapture” has more of the bluesy sleaze the album opens with, and “The Shock of the Lightning” follows with exactly what Oasis does best: a tune that makes people enjoy the moment they’re listening to the song, that make dancing and being alive a religious experience.

But after “The Shock of the Lightning,” Dig Out Your Soul takes a nosedive. Oasis sheds its attempts to sound “epic” and puts on its attempts to sound like “respectable, mature musicians.”

But those epics are what make Oasis sound like respectable, mature musicians. This is the band famous for antics like snorting coke in the Queen of England’s bathroom and calling Phil Collins the c-word. Thoughtful songs with titles like “The Nature of Reality” seem not just a little shallow.

Given the album’s first few tracks, it sucks to admit Dig Out Your Soul won’t last. But at least for now, it has enough cocky grandeur to get caught up in.