Yes, the rumors are true: Oasis has—for the first time in a decade—made an album worth hearing. And it's not just worth hearing once for old times' sake. The songs on Don't Believe The Truth hold up to repeat listens. Some might even sound good blasting out of car windows this summer. In short, Don't Believe The Truth is a good Oasis album, a species that once seemed as unlikely to surface as a passenger pigeon. It's not that Noel and Liam Gallagher (the original lineup's sole survivors) ever disappeared. New albums appeared regularly, and the always-colorful, always-quotable Gallagher boys were never far from the headlines. But with each subsequent release, the band seemed to settle a little deeper into the stadium-rock release-an-album-as-an-excuse-to-tour pattern. It's as if the Gallaghers had become one of the classic-rock acts they'd imitated before their time, existing solely to summon up pleasant memories of their 1994 and 1995 hits.
Now they've broken the pattern. The question, however, isn't "Why?" or "How?" but "What took them so long?" It's not like what Oasis does is blazingly difficult, particularly since the savantish Gallaghers have always given the impression that making rich, anthemic, backward-looking rock music is all they were capable of. They were already in position to make sky-blazing Oasis-style music, so why not take advantage of that before?
But why complain? Nothing on Don't Believe The Truth quite reaches the pint-glass transcendence of Oasis' first album, but there's still plenty to feel good about. "Lyla," the first single, works a classic Oasis trick, letting electric drama build from an acoustic start. Terrible title aside, "Mucky Fingers" doesn't waste any time churning out a propulsive beat, and "Guess God Thinks I'm Abel" taps into Oasis' sometimes-overlooked softer side.
In short, call it a comeback. Not a huge comeback, and not a reinvention by any stretch. But then, Oasis has never really been about reinvention, apart from reinventing other performers' best work, and its grandness has always begun and ended with the chords. But the world is better off with a fully operational Oasis—cloddish sense of pride and uncanny sense of melody included—than without one. Welcome back.