RECORDINGS Quick Spins

Oasis will always be held to the standard of its sparkling first efforts, "Definitely Maybe" and "(What's the Story) Morning Glory," which almost deserve those high placements they receive in the British music press's seemingly semi-weekly rankings of the 100 Best British Albums Ever. On those records, picking out the singles was a tough task because every song was packed with a memorable chorus and equally soaring vocals and guitar solos.

On "Dig Out Your Soul" the opposite holds true; obvious singles are nowhere to be found. "The Shock of the Lightning" comes closest. Liam doesn't sneer all the way through this one, instead offering up a distinct vocal melody, while his brother creates an appealing wall of sound with his guitar. But the Gallaghers' penchant for anthems seems to be gone, and a slightly glammed-up, much heavier sound doesn't suit them. It's hardly terrible, and hey, it might even sound good while you're waiting in line for the loo after they've played "Don't Look Back in Anger."

-- David Malitz

DOWNLOAD THESE:"The Shock of the Lightning," "Bag It Up"

APPEAL TO REASON

Rise Against

Rise Against is a Noam Chomsky band in a hot-topic world. The Chicago quartet is the latest neo-punk group to grapple with a very real question: How do you sing about politics without irritating half the electorate and putting the other half to sleep?

The answer: Make an album that both pummels and entertains. Named after a rabble-rousing socialist newspaper of the early 1900s, "Appeal to Reason" is the band's third disc for a major label, which pretty much sums up its dilemma.

But Rise Against seems to have absorbed the lessons of its punk-rock forebears, whose insistence on mirthless politicizing often doomed them to virtuous irrelevancy, at least as far as the mainstream was concerned. Its songs are about wars overseas and about domestic unrest, but about love, too, though the latter is mostly an afterthought, and the songs about romantic disappointment are virtually indistinguishable from the songs about government.

Few groups are as skilled at wrapping take-your-medicine lyrics in mercilessly catchy, shout-the-chorus punk-pop as Rise Against -- like Fall Out Boy if that band listened to a lot of ska and had a point. "Lights go out as we pass the torch again/In hope that it stays lit/Neutrality means that you don't really care," frontman Tim McIlrath sings on the best track, "Collapse (Post-Amerika)."

"Reason" isn't immune from painful bouts of obviousness: Spelling "America" with a "k" is one of those instant signifiers of deathly seriousness; so is any mention of the graves of innocents ("Kotov Syndrome") or the shallowness of pop culture ("Entertainment").