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Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds “Who Built The Moon?”
(2017)
Fort Knox/Holy Mountain/Keep On Reaching/It’s A Beautiful
World/She Taught Me How To Fly/Be Careful What You Wish For/Black and White
Sunshine/Interlude (Wednesday Part One)/If Love Is The Law/The Man Who Built
The Moon/End Credits (Wednesday Part Two)
‘If
you’re waiting for the rapture, the day will never come’
Hey, it wasn’t me Noel, don’t look at me like that!
I had such a good introduction to this review
planned, dear readers, I really did. Something intellectual about how Noel was
now an astronaut at a distance to the planet who was now trying to work out how
to function as a satellite to how he used to be in Oasis, or how being on the
moon is sometimes the only way to see your life on Earth properly. But then I
caught Noel’s performance of some songs on Jools Holland’s interminable
‘Later…’ shows where he was backed by a girl playing a pair of scissors as a
backing track to his new songs and like many fans I just can’t get over it. I
mean, cut it out Noel, you’re a legend, you don’t need to have gimmicks behind
you on stage. I don’t understand this new musical world Noel’s fallen into –
and the fact that I’ve been left behind cuts me like a knife. I mean the music
these antics inspired isn’t exactly cutting edge is it? It’s more like The
Scissor Sisters! Brother Liam had fun with it, responding to an interviewer
that his next gig was going ‘to blow people’s minds…I’m going to have a man on
stage sharpening a pencil!’ Actually Liam changed his mind and ‘auditioned’
potato peelers at his next gig, a stunt that went down rather well, especially
as he out-stared the audience with intense glare while surrounded by potato
peelings. All of which only adds up to one thing: didn’t Noel learn as a
musician that you weren’t supposed to play with scissors?
Alright, that’s enough cutting remarks now because
the scissors is just a distraction from what’s really going on in this album –
it isn’t actually very good. Or, if I put it another way, it isn’t very good if
you’ve lived and breathed Oasis for two decades. Once upon a time, in 1994 to
be exact, Oasis were the band who brought music back to the people, real live
people playing real live instruments and making rock and roll cool again. They
were aptly named, an oasis of ‘real’ music in a landscape that had forgotten
how to play and Noel and his guitar were so intertwined I don’t know if I ever
saw a picture of the two apart in the 1990s. Noel was also one of our most
erudite ambassadors for rock and roll, someone who looked as if he would always
stay true to the sheer oomph that rock and roll brought the world. But in his
solo career it feels as if he’s realised that rock and roll truly is dead and
buried and he’s sought to reinvent himself as the sort of musician his teenage
children look up to. Which is all very well if you like that sort of thing, but
there are other bands who do all that sort of thing – and to be honest they all
sound the same. Be it a new band, an old band or an even older bands trying to
keep in with the kids, pretty much all modern music sounds the same: the tinny
drum sound, the synths that play notes rather than chords, the dodgy mixes that
leave the vocals turned down low, the trance mood that means songs come without
hooks, choruses or verses and good luck trying to find an instrumental break or
a middle eight in any song by a ‘new’ band in the past twenty years (since
Oasis stopped being cool, not coincidentally). For all I know this might be
very good modern music. But its still modern music. Other bands do that stuff
already and nobody is going to be listening to any of it in thirty years (apart
from a few people who grew up on it and don’t know any better). To hear one of
our ‘own’ giving up the only art-form that makes you live and breathe and dance
and sing and rock and roll for some dodgy synths and empty droning tracks is a
bit like asking Leonardo Da Vinci along to paint your garden fence: it’s a
waste of your time and theirs when there are a million other people around to
do that in the Yellow Pages and they could be getting on with something better.
Like making actual music.
My original review, before the scissors routine, was
to have started with a joke too. There have been two major new developments
since Noel’s last album in 2015. One is that Noel turned outside songwriter,
writing a song for the Monkees reunion album ‘Good Times’ in 2016 along with
collaborator Paul Weller (though the resulting ‘Accidental Birth Of A Hipster’
doesn’t much like The Monkees, Oasis or Weller’s work at all, despite having
all that history to play with – still a good song though, better than any
here). Another is that Noel has healed the long-standing music press-boosted
row between rivals Oasis and Blur, something which peaked in 1996 when ‘Roll
With It’ came out the same week as ‘Country House’. Neither are the band’s best
work – Damon Alburn was sadly right when he declared the former sounded ‘a bit
too much like Status Quo’ on the radio and Oasis would have been within their
rights to say that, for all their Beatle ‘influences’ down the year, none had
ever been as blatant as Blur completely missing the message of Kinks song ‘A
House In The Country’ and recycling it almost word for word. The whole thing
got blown out of proportion, leading to fights between the ‘posh boys’ in Blur
who actually went to university and thought deep thoughts and the working class
kids in Oasis from Manchester who grew up in the slums (even to a posh London
club, where Damon was chatting with Stephen Fry when a chair landed through the
window as thrown by a drunken Liam in horror that anyone rock and roll would
even be in a club). Noel and Damon have long since put their differences aside
and have now started working together, on this album and Damon’s next, which in
musical terms is akin to Keith Richards joining Paul McCartney’s band as a
guitarist. Which is good for the idea that peace and love and forgiveness will
work in music. But bad for the music itself. Damon long ago jumped ship from
Britpop to the dodgy electronica of the millennium and Noel, you sense, has
long been jealous of the freedom his new friend was enjoying. For suddenly,
after a year when he was trying to be a wannabe Monkee, Noel has become a
wannabe ‘Gorrillaz’, the ‘fake’ cartoon band Damon created as a joke which
ended up outs-selling every Blur album since 1996.
Noel is one of life’s natural blaggers. He’s walked
the walk and talked the talk so well on chat shows and in publicity for the
album that a lot of fans have believed him, that he loves this new musical work
and has never sounded so at home and isn’t it fabulous that he doesn’t have to
wear a guitar round his neck anymore. He’s clearly been looking on at Damon’s
success and thinking ‘I’ll have a bit of that’ and he’s hired all the right
people who seem to know what they’re doing, delivering an album that I could
well believe was crafted by a talented eighteen-year-old unknown in his
bedroom, given a few expensive overdubs in a posh studio to beef up the sound. Of
course he was going to go in a big way for guest artist Charlotte Marrionneau
when he asked her to turn up with him to play on Jools Holland’s awful
patronising show and she looked annoyed when he handed her a tambourine (‘I
won’t play that, but I can play the scissors’ she’s meant to have said to him,
although the phrase that most tickled Noel came five minutes before filming
when she said ‘hang on, I’ll just go get my cape…’) Noel needs a Yoko figure
and seems to have found one – like Lennon, his playful mind was always going to
love this way of thinking out the box and he’s pretty good at ‘acting’ a role
himself. But that happens too often across this album. To these ears at least
Noel sounds hopelessly adrift and lost, a half-decent actor playing a role to
sound youthful and trendy rather than someone who actually believes what he’s
singing. The problem was there in his two solo albums, the best of which tended
to be the retro stuff: ‘Noel G’s High Flying Birds’ only really worked on the
Oasis outtakes, while sequel ‘Chasing Yesterday’ only worked on the jazz tunes
Oasis once mocked. This third album, though, is the ‘Be Here Now’ of his solo years,
tipped hopelessly over the top in one direction and with songs over-extended to
the point where even the most interesting of them are in danger of being
boring. There is, to be fair, greatness on both albums that often got
overlooked on ‘Be Here Now’ and I sense there’ll be a lot more in a hundred
playings’ time when I get to know this record better: already the playful pop
of ‘Black and White Sunshine’ (which sounds like The Stone Roses doing disco)
and the acoustic strum of ‘God Help Us All’ (which sounds like an old fashioned
Oasis B-side) stand out nicely. But most of this record is one big splurge of
noise which doesn’t seem to change from track to track. There’s no excitement
over the brave new musical future here, just a sense that Noel’s covering up
the fact that he’s forgotten how to write a decent melody.
The fact that this album was delayed, by a month, to
allow the fuss over Liam’s return to rock and roll on ‘As You Were’, is
interesting (this record was first announced for October, then November 9th,
then delayed to the 24th). Noel’s loyal fans and friends, Paul
Weller included, have spoken up over how exciting it is that the elder
Gallagher is working with a whole new musical repertoire while his brother is
going backwards, but that suggests loyalty to me rather than any sense that
they’ve actually heard the record (hey Weller’s going deaf anyway these days –
his last two albums are similarly modern and disappointing for such a rock and
roller). Liam’s album was surprisingly un-Oasisy in parts, with the non-rocking
acoustic songs working best. The fact that it made #1 in the album charts and
won over a lot of new fans who assumed Liam was a new act (eyebrows are in this
year!) proves that there is a market for music played on ‘real’ instruments
though. Noel seems to have bolted down a rabbit hole he didn’t need to escape
to because a full rock and roll album from the elder brother released in 2017
could have big too. We need to have proper musicians back again, people who
know how to play their instruments rather than programme them. It doesn’t mean
we have to go backwards, because suddenly, after twenty years of every song
sounding the same, it’s ‘Who Built The Moon?’ that sounds oddly backwards and
out of step with where music is heading.
Why is the album called that anyway? Noel spent most
of the publicity for his last album cringing over the fact that it was called
‘Chasing Yesterday’ because he hated the title and claims someone else at the
record company thought it up. I can’t wait to see who he blames for his new
title because it’s one of the oddest, ugliest, ill-fitting names for an album
I’ve heard for a long time. There is, you see, a frame of thought amongst
conspiracy theorists that the moon was indeed built rather than formed. Scientifically,
it really shouldn’t be there – of all the many solar systems we’ve mapped now,
no other planet has a satellite that big next to it. Evolutionists reckon that
the moon was integral to the development of life on this planet as it created
what was so needed for life, with what is now increasingly looking like the
strongest tide in the universe causing us to move out of our primordial soup.
People (some people anyway) are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the
moon wasn’t formed, but ‘parked’, while analysis of the moon landing footage
reveals some really weird discrepancies that suggest that, rather than being
formed out of rocks with the same make-up as our own planet, it sounds
distinctly hollow. There’s a whole triple album prog rock concept work in there
somewhere – and I am drying to hear Noel write something with that kind of
scope one day, because he has the talent and work ethic to make one, a
‘Quadrophenia’ for the Britpop generation about growing older and growing up
enough to see through the con of The Spice Girls, for instance, or he could do
a Moody Blues and make a sequel to ‘Our Children’s Children’s Children’ about
how the optimism over our progress in space came a cropper after deaths and
mistakes and recessions.
Instead we get just another album which, if I’ve
read the lyrics right (it’s not as if you can hear many of them) is all about
love. Only that’s actually the album’s most interesting feature, given that
Noel isn’t a writer whose ever really done ‘love’ before, preferring to write
in general poetry for a specific generation or how his life either did or
didn’t turn out the way he dreamed of as a kid. Noel has been married to
one-time Oasis publicist, Sara McDonald, since 2000 (that’s her in the distance
on the album cover) and finally has the family life he always dreamed of as an
unknown aspiring wannabe in the early 1990s, without as many musical
commitments to get in the way. Oasis song ‘Waiting For The Rapture’ is said to
be about their meeting and with its similarly hazy quality, weird song
structure and tinny drums sounds more like this album than anything else in the
Oasis songbook. The title is referred to across this album more than once too,
suggesting that at least one of the love songs on this album is definitively
for Sara. The other songs sound like they come from a similar place too, which
is lovely as that goes – there aren’t nearly enough straightforward love songs
in oasis’ catalogue and most of those were written by Liam in their final days
anyway. But the trouble is that Noel is so determined that he wants to sound
young and trendy that the lyrics sound more like fumbling teenage love than a
man with a past and a realisation of the risks when love goes wrong. Every time
Noel sings about ‘stormy seas’ and how ‘there’s nothing left for me’ we’re not
sure we believe him (even if ‘If Love Is The Law’ does feature the best lyric
on the album, suggesting everything isn’t always that idyllic at home). It’s an
easy jibe to say that musicians get fat and middle aged as they have families
of their own and lose the need to make their mark they did in their younger
hungrier days, but Noel was never like that – old before his time, he yearned
for the family life, the domestication, the security. Even a joke like ‘Married
With Children’ wasn’t really a joke, but what Noel wanted – warts and bad vibes
and arguments and break-ups and all. But now he’s found it, he doesn’t seem to
know what to do about it. He spends this album recounting how he met his wife,
how much he loves her, how much other people ain’t got what he’s got and how
much he’d hate to lose it. There’s even, on a live acoustic track hidden away
near the end of the deluxe edition, a song about how much he still misses his
ex, Meg Matthews (unless it’s about first girlfriend Louise again, like much of
‘Definitely Maybe’ was). The standout track by a million light years (not least
because the annoying backing isn’t here, with just a guitar and piano), Noel
sings this one from the heart and it’s lovely. Why oh why couldn’t the rest of
the album have been more like this? Why did Noel have to hide his feelings
behind a backing best described as forgettable, frequently described as ‘noisy’
and one that’s going to sound more dated than the entire Oasis back catalogue
in about five years or so.
My guess is he’s working with the wrong people, who
don’t ‘get’ his music the way a rock and roll backing band would. His producer
David Holmes is actually only two years his junior (and thus two years older
than Liam), but he’s made a name for himself working with modern acts, indeed
all but inventing a whole new genre of electronica, partly on film soundtrack
scores like the memorably titled ‘The Film’s Crap So Let’s Slash The Seats!’
and the ‘Ocean’s Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen’ series (personally I’m looking forward
to ‘Ocean’s Eighty’ when they’re all OAPs and George Clooney gets lost in the
crowd scenes). He’s very good at what he does and the fact that he was working
with Noel at all won some extra quizzical comments in the press and
back-slapping from music journalists who like their oldie acts to act young and
trendy. Job done – but there’s a sense that the producer and artists don’t
understand each other on a basic level. The only other musician who ‘gets’ his
music is Gem, from the later Oasis line-ups, and even he’s overshadowed by the
sheer noise of the synths and drums (played by Chris Sharrock of Beady Eye,
incidentally, where he sounds badly miscast. Then again so does Noel’s
longstanding hero, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, whose inaudible on ‘If Love Is
The Law’). There are five seconds on the deluxe edition of the album that
reveal everything to me. Seconds after singing his heart out on ‘Dead In The
Water’ – a really committed, full-on vocal that’s dripping with sincerity and
desperation – the producer asks him ‘is that it?’ ‘That’ll do won’t it?’ Noel
asks, eager-to-lease and perhaps not quite understanding how good that take
was. The fact that it appears only on the deluxe, rather than the
straightforward edition, reveals a lot too about the attitudes of the people
making this record, where production matters more than performance or
songwriting. For all his bravado (because of his bravado?) and punch-ups in the
press Noel has a much thinner skin than people realise and doesn’t always know
what his best work is or where to go with it. He really needs someone he can
rely on as his ‘mirror’, to tell him where he does well and does badly and to
bring the best out of himself. I can’t help but worry that, ever since Alan
McGee got sick on drug addiction and abandoned him out of necessity in 1997,
that Noel has never had that direction. I’m sure some fans will like this album
and its already getting stable reviews, if not stellar ones. But to these ears
Holmes is not the right person and the backing band made up of session musos
are not his people. Noel needs rock and roll with a few dashes of something else
– covering his music up with pure noise just drowns out the melody and lyrics
that are Noel’s stock in trade and leaves him sounding nervous, doing what he’s
told because other people think it sounds good rather than because he believes
it.
The result is an album that’s disappointing not
because it’s awful, but because so much of it is so nearly good. Traditionally
in their later days Oasis would hire trendy remixes to go over their latest
work and make it sound different – bigger usually, more trance and dance like,
more repetitive. What I’d love to hear is an ‘un-remix’ version of this set
where all that huge noise and endless repetition and overdubs (there are
twenty-nine musicians credited on the sleeve, with all but three of them
appearing on pretty much every song) are shorn away to leave the often quite
interesting songs underneath. For an album that’s built to sound big and bold
and expressive, even aggressive (the horrid ‘Holy Mountain’ is Noel’s ‘demand’
that his future wife fall in love with him and is about as unromantic a
depiction of a first date as you can get), you can’t help but feel that,
underneath all the surface, there’s actually quite a sweet series of fragile
songs in here. ‘Who Built The Moon?’ should be an album about second thoughts,
whether it’s the guilty songs wondering why a marriage entering its second
decade doesn’t feel the way it did when the love was new, that a career is
sliding away or that somebody really did build the moon (red herring as that
subject matter might be). Instead it’s an album that isn’t allowed to sound
weak or feeble at all, with cries of ‘you gotta get yourself together!’ turned
from a personal cry into an angry attack and where the brash and arrogant
public demeanour of Noel in public has come to overshadow the vulnerability of
his actual songs. I would love to know who built ‘Who Built The Moon?’ because
most of the time it doesn’t sound like Noel. He’s in there, somewhere, but
nowhere nearly enough. But maybe this ‘failure’ is the album he needs to really
spurn him on to do what we fans know he really can do – and that on album four,
just maybe, it will be ‘Here Comes The Sun’.
‘I guess some people would rather we stay in 1995.
But those of us who lived through it don’t want to go back there – you want to
go somewhere new’ said Noel on the eve of his album. Err, no. Absolutely nobody
who ever lived through the years 1996-2017 ever said to themselves ‘yippee I’m
living in a golden musical age and I hope we stay here!’ All the best albums of
the intervening twenty years have harked back in some way to music from the
years before. To be honest most of us who were around in 1995 weren’t going yippee
either but responding ‘well, it ain’t up to 1965 or 1975 but it’s the best
we’ve got and it doesn’t us too ill, it’ll kind of have to do’. Opening song
‘Fort Knox’ is good evidence as to why nobody in the distant future history of
mankind will be downloading an album titled ‘The earth’s greatest hits
2002-2017’. It has a screechy synthesiser opening that’s clearly meant to
invoke tension and mayhem, but just sounds like so much noise, like hearing
‘Fuckin’ In The Bushes’ from the fourth Oasis album played on a loop with a
truly awful drum pattern over it. This is the debut of the mass choir of nine
backing vocals, but they don’t get much more to do than some ‘hey hey hey’s.
This doesn’t sound anything like Noel’s usual style, the only give away being the
helicopter sound effects at the beginning and the sound effects of the ringing
alarms that run like a spiky backing track through the whole thing. The
official lyric seems to consist of the following: He-e-ey, He-e-ey, keep a hold
on, keep a hold on, he-e-ey, he-e-y, keep on holding out, holding on, he-e-e-y,
uhhhh!’ ‘Fort Knox’, of course, is about one of the world’s most impenetrable
prisons. The song is aptly named because this is one of Noel’s most
impenetrable tracks and a daring opening to a new work. The courage of
releasing it alone has brought out raptures of ecstasy in some fans, but it’s
all so mangled and directionless and pointlessly noisy to me. I would rather
listen to flipping scissors!
The worst track on the album though is surely the
first single ‘Holy Mountain’. Noel sings, no shouts, a lot of cringeworthy
lines about how he forced his girlfriend to fall in love with him. There’s a
contradiction here that you can’t force someone to love you or it isn’t love –
but that isn’t the song. Instead it’s one of the noisiest five minutes of your
life as Noel yells ‘she fell, she fell, right under my spell!’ and offers some
of the worst lines of his career: ‘Come and be my baby doll, come and know me
like the back of my hand!’ Or how about this from a later verse? ‘Do your thang
on the beat of the bang, I’ll put a melody inside your head!’ Err, no you won’t
Noel because there’s virtually no melody here, just a staccato rant that keeps
going, like a drunk who doesn’t know when to shut up. The backing is at least
slightly more interesting than the last track, with its manic Beach Boys
falsetto whoops (Noel really has been spending a lot of time with Paul Weller
lately hasn’t he?) and there’s some nice use of saxophones as grit and muscle,
rather than the usual artificial romantic way they’re used. But everything else
is all synthesisers left over from the 1980s and drumming that’s louder than
everything else in the room despite being the single most boring part Chris
Sharrock has played on record in his career. The fact that Noel is singing all
this through a megaphone doesn’t help either. This horror is surely the worst
song any member of Oasis has ever ever released, right up there with ‘Get Your
High Horse Lady’ as a real ‘what the hell is going on?!?’ moment. Making this
the first single from the album when it’s about as catchy as support for Donald
Trump at the moment is a bold move, bordering on stupid. Oh and Noel also
continues his practice of pretentious song titles, with the idea of a ‘Holy Mountain’
a far more interesting idea than anything we get in the lyrics of Noel’s
ugliest, noisiest and -unfortunately given the times of sex scandals – most
mysognistic song.
The album improves with ‘Keep On Reaching’, which is
the closest thing to a ‘sleeper’ on the album. The rhythm guitar blushes that
keep sliding in and out of a catchy synth riff by Mike Rowe adds up to a great
groove and the backing singers and huge scale make more sense here than
elsewhere. The song is almost Motown as people demand en masse ‘can you keep a
secret?’ and Noel’s only response is to shout out his heart as he succumbs to
the pressure, denouncing ‘the bogeyman’ and how ‘I’m gonna write that in a
song!’ It feels as if this lyric has had a lot more time laboured on it
compared to the other sketches on this album and sounds very much to me as if
its Noel’s response to his brother Liam’s pokes and digs on twitter over the
past few year. ‘You’ve spilled your guts but you got no one!’ spits Noel, as he
keeps trying to keep the rising bile in his throat down and instead of reacting
tries to reach for ‘higher ground’. This is surely Liam given lines like ‘I can
reach for my old guitar, you can sing it like a monkey man’, but unlike Liam’s
songs (which take aim, fires but then offer an apology and a hand of
friendship, questioning where things went wrong) this is just so much shouting
and doesn’t really represent the ‘higher ground’ the way kinder Liam and Beady
Eye songs like ‘The Beat Goes On’ ‘For What It’s ‘Worth’ ‘Come Back To Me’ and
even ‘Don’t Brother Me’ do. That’s a shame because we do get a hint at
brotherly concern underneath all the shouting, hidden away towards the end of
the song when Noel sees his brother’s face ‘on the cover of a magazine’ and
instead of the usual Liam arrogance sees eyes that are bruised and hurt ‘and
wore a face I have never seen’. Alas this ends up as pointless shouting again:
‘You spill your guts but you got none!’ Not to take sides in the Oasis battle,
but I get the feeling that if nothing else Liam is being honest about his
feelings, while Noel is hiding behind a smokescreen of all his ‘heavy’ friends
and noise instead of singing from the heart (well, not till the bonus tracks
anyway!) Noel is legendarily a song-nicker extraordinary. From The Beatles to a
court-case brought by Stevie Wonder, he usually nicks from the best sources.
However ‘Keep On Reaching’ steals from an unlikely source: The Bee Gees’
‘Stayin’ Alive’ crossed with the theme tune from Disney series ‘Duck Tales’.
Seriously, go and have a listen, it’s the ‘you can’t try to understand…’ middle
eight part of the former crossed with the ‘woo-oohs!’ of the latter!
‘It’s A Beautiful World’ adds some psychedelia to
the sound, which is something I’ve longed for Noel to do since hearing his
spot-on approximation on ‘Who Feels Love?’ (an under-rated Oasis song if ever
there was one). But this song is so busy trying to sound trendy and modern that
it loses all the mystical ethereal feel that it should have had, burying the
main idea behind another clattering drum part and another vocal line that isn’t
sung so much as it’s shouted. This is another of the better songs on the album
though and has been really growing on me, especially the way Gem’s harmony
vocal suddenly arrives to soar in tandem with Noel’s for a few precious verses.
Had the song kept up the air of mystery there was on the verses and with the
psychedelic swirling effects I could have truly loves this song: Noel is trying
to sum up how love feels to him and he can’t find the words so instead embarks
on metaphors: love is a ‘song’, a ‘prayer’, a ‘dream’ and in homage to ‘Eleanor
Rigby’s face in a jar by the door a ‘face you’ve never seen before, that you
keep with a key you’ve found’, a startling image that proves Noel’s still got
it. But alas his latest Beatle fixation leads him into very rum territory
indeed. Paul McCartney’s ‘Beautiful Night’ is the single worst song the ex
Beatle ever wrote – its patronising, insincere and has all the charm and depth
of an advertising jingle. Noel rips off practically all of it for this song’s
chorus and is even more blatant about it than normal. I can forgive him ripping
off ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and all the great Beatle songs
out there, but does he really have to rip off the bad ones too? Things get
weirder for the ‘Yoko’ moment towards the end when Charlotte Marrianneau, she
of the scissors, gets to do what she really came to do and starts speaking in
French over the track. It seems oddly perverse and yet somehow right to hear a
cod-Yoko moment over the top of such a McCartney moment, as if Noel is out to
claim that he was both Lennon and McCartney in The Beatles. But Yoko always had
a reason to be there on the record, even if many fans wished she wasn’t – she
always had some extra emotion to convey, be it love or terror. This passage
adds nothing and translates as roughly ‘Attention ladies and gentlemen, hold on
tight and say goodbye, mankind is now melting at the poles, watch out! Borders
close, inhale exhale carbon monoxide’. Don’t worry Noel, Charlotte’s only
looking for mankind in the snow, but the elder Gallagher is walking on very
thin ice here and the result sounds patronising and false, even though the song
started for a few seconds there with the most ‘real’ and ‘alive’ moment on the
album.
‘She Taught Me How To Fly’ is another love song. The
most Oasisy moment here, with its triple-tracked guitars and groovy rock beat,
it’s hypnotically catchy and is the one song from the album that you’ll actually
remember by the time it stops playing. However once again its all but ruined by
an insistence on making it all sound modern – where once Noel would have really
made this song rock, instead it gets a trance hypno beat makeover that makes it
sound awful. The pat-a-cake drums are so loud, the synths don’t play notes so
much as swash about between chords and the bass is so loud its giving me
ear-ache. There’s a great song in there somewhere, but we need a mix to hear it
– or perhaps a future deluxe edition with what will presumably be a typically
Noel sweet and charming guitar demo attached. Once again the lyrics are clearly
written in a hurry and can barely be heard anyway. For all the many fans
falling over themselves to proclaim this album’s greatness, I have to say this
is flimsy stuff when you look at the words away from the riff: ‘The one I love,
she is divine, she’s out to blow my mind’. Also, what the hell does this
ungrammatical verse even mean? ‘’Don’t matter what your name is, she around all
the time, you lost your mind and your maqke-up, your money too, I don’t mind…’
I’m willing to bet that this song is about Noel’s wife Sara when he first met
her, working as a publicist for the good, the bad, the famous, the unknown and
the ugly, but like so many tracks on this album the idea is sound but gets
mangled somewhere along the way. There’s no real story in this song, nothing
really of substance, just a riff that would have worked a lot better had it
been kept as an instrumental. Even in 1967, at the height of this sort of
thing, a band would have hidden a lyric like that away on the B-side of their
latest release, not made it the sort of lyric to accompany the big ear-catching
song on the album. At least the riff is a good one though and still gives me
hope if we can ever get Noel to admit defeat and go back to making ‘proper’
music again. Sigh…
At last we get a chance to catch our breath with ‘Be
Careful What You Wish For’ for thirty seconds at least. This latest
Lennon-loving song rips off ‘Come Together’ and comes with the same slow swampy
blues feel and an almost identical riff. At least the backing band are better
at sounding claustrophobic and menacing than they do sounding joyous and the
song comes off as another ‘Gas Panic!’, a self-deprecating song of terror and
paranoia that has some interesting ideas. ‘You can play the game song, but
they’ll never let you in!’ grins Noel, before he sings some wordless vocals
that really sound like crying while the backing band chant in the background
what sounds like some exotic voodoo curse. The song brightens up considerably
with a shimmering Pink Floyd-style instrumental solo, but the rest of the
backing sadly stays much the same throughout, a dull thud rather than the
shimmer a song like this demands. Even so it’s easily one of the best things on
the record, with a fascinating revealing lyric that, ironically, is all about
the art of hiding your true self behind a barrier (‘behind walls’ in Stephen
Stills parlance). ‘Never let them bear witness to the tears in your eyes’ Noel
concludes, while ‘you’ve fallen like an angel. Stranded on the earth’. Oddly
enough it sounds like ‘Born On A Different Cloud, the Liam song I’m still
convinced was written in solidarity with his brother, as if Noel has been
listening to his old records and remembering better days. It suits Noel here to
sound like an alien in a mad old world he doesn’t understand – a song like that
makes perfect sense of the cold austere backing which sounds nothing like Noel
has ever given us before (even if I wish he’d also chosen a tune The Beatles
hadn’t done before either). Noel’s smug grin, so obviously a surface smile
making small talk with us and pretending that he isn’t revealing his inner
thoughts, is also his best work on the album – his best in a couple of albums I
would say. Our review of all three Noel solo albums now have been making the
claim that he’s been ‘hiding’ something from us, suffering writer’s block as he
tries to work out who he is after some personal crisis he doesn’t want to admit
to – this song seems to back that up, as its surely too ‘real’ to be as ‘fake’
as much of the rest of the album. Even so, though, like much of the record it
lacks the variety it needs to be a classic, something that made the best of the
last album ‘Chasing Yesterdays’ so special (‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Riverman’
particularly).
‘Black and White Sunshine’ is better yet though, the
anger and power and oomph of early Oasis peeking through a song that has its
1960s roots on show far more than the modern noise. Obviously it’s going to be
my favourite song on the actual album, then, (with better yet on the deluxe
edition) as it’s the one made for fans like me rather than people who mistake
noise for music and it’s a joy to hear Noel actually connecting with his music
and singing to us direct instead of behind a smokescreen. Noel is depressed,
‘the weight of the world dragging me down’, aware that he has to change leading
him to the idea of ‘shedding my skin like a snake’. But what’s left behind when
he does that? Noel doesn’t know, coming up with this very Pete Townshend esque
song about identity and how he only feels he can be himself when he sees
himself through other people’s eyes. I wondered for a while if this was another
love song – it probably is, but I have a sneaking feeling he’s writing for
Oasis fans here too. My guess, what with all the Britpop overtones (this song
is the bounce and harmonies of ‘She’s Electric’ meeting the power and riffing
of ‘Morning Glory’), is that this is Noel’s response to seeing the ‘Supersonic’
documentary on early Oasis and remembering just how great it felt to be at the
peak of his powers, the most recognised and loved songwriter on the planet,
uniting a generation all too briefly. ‘These are the glory days for waifs and
strays’ he sings, amazed at the power he feels uniting all the lost, lonely
people who ever felt like he used to in some massive movement of optimism and
hope. However that was a time long past (‘Qu’est Ce Que C’est, where are they
now?’ he wonders) and he doesn’t see his ‘people’ as vividly anymore now,
admitting it’s been so long ‘I’ve forgotten your name’. Even so, though, he
feels a power tugging him to this particular generation of Oasis fans, adding
‘you give me love – I give you praise’, before summing up the power of the
Gallagher brothers with the line to Liam ‘you got the nerve – and I got the
brains!’ The song is joyous, the chorus unfolding into a hopeful anthem – is
this Noel’s first truly happy song since ‘She Is Love’? All the more
extraordinary, then, that it’s bookended with one of the most revealing moments
yet, as a weary and disillusioned Noel wonders if it’s even worth his while
getting out of bed as he ‘feels the heat’ and ‘can’t get a break’ in a world
that’s forgotten him. This leads to an odd conclusion with one last moment of
arrogance and ego: ‘We got them crawling on their hands and knees!’ Noel
gloats, before he ends up right back where he begun and its him whose crawling
on his hands and knees, searching for a way. A fascinating song and the best
thing on the ‘actual’ album by a zillion light years. Noel is a natural for
songs like these – he needs to write them more, sticking to the generation he
understands more than anybody instead of trying to appeal to a whole new one
who don’t care who he is and whom he clearly doesn’t understand.
‘Interlude’ is two minutes of, well, what is it
exactly? When Paul McCartney ‘pretended’ to be The Fireman and did similarly weird
stuff under a pseudonym, it still somehow managed to sound like him, his alter
ego fooling no one. But no one would possibly have guessed that this was a Noel
Gallagher track without looking and is he even on it? Even the guitar sounds more
like Gem to me. The guitars aren’t as important as the aah-ing choir the very
1980s slap-bass anyway, never mind the twinkling synths that are trying to be
all calm and peaceful or the very noisy drums that are anything but. At least
there’s a tune this time though and it’s a good one in a ‘Pink Floyd have
forgotten to write some words again’ kind of a way, making this song far more
deserving of a place on the album than the opening instrumental. In many ways
its hypnotic beauty finally achieves the sort of thing Noel had been aiming for
since at least ‘Heathen Chemistry’ in 2002, a sort of floaty moody piece that
conveys emotion by atmosphere alone (the untitled instrumental that ends that
LP is the closest in sound and scale and scope out of the whole Oasis canon).
But typically for this album it all fades away after two minutes, just as it
was getting interesting.
Most fans have been jumping up and down over ‘If
Love Is the Law’, a weird combination of Motown, Christmas singles, Bavarian
Eurovision entries and some drunken guy shouting through a megaphone on top of
a rooftop. There is a great stomping hook in there, with a beat similar to ‘Lyla’
and a melody similar to ‘Live Forever’, but away from the bits that sound recycled
from gems of old, what’s new is pretty ordinary. Noel is alone in a town he
doesn’t know well, presumably on tour, on a lyric to a song that’s juvenile and
one-dimensional compared to his brother’s ‘Chinatown’ (the definitive Oasis ‘getting
lost’ song). Liam had a whole gameplan over how to get back to town and used
the metaphor of a town for his career. Noel’s just getting upset that he isn’t
home and venting his feelings by ranting to us. Cross the song ‘time’ rhymes
with ‘crime’, there are ‘things left unsaid while lying on my bed’ and the odd
central idea that ‘if love is the law then this a crime’. My guess is that he’s
had a falling out with his missus, perhaps over the strain of being so far away
just as their family life is getting cosy, but that as a born musician this is
what Noel is meant to do – to travel the world, connecting to fans with music
and touching base occasionally to stay normal and sane. That would have been a
great song – Noel, the hero of a generation for his music, aware that to his
family his music is what keeps him apart from them, something they can never
quite share in. But we don’t get that song – we get this confused mess of
metaphors instead. Noel also spends the whole song shouting, which is wearing
when it’s on a bed of similarly shouty artificial synths and drums rather than
actual pure guitars. Still, the second half of the album is a lot better than
the first isn’t it?!
‘The Man Who Built The Moon’ is a big epic scream of
a number, something akin to all the songs I love the most in the Oasis
catalogue: ‘Fade-In Out’ ‘Gas Panic’ ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ It even
sounds not unlike ‘Little By Little’ in terms of melody. But alas it sounds
like all those past epics without actually being as good as any of them. In
terms of lyric this is another of those ‘ah, I’ll fill it in later’ songs that
don’t do much except follow the song’s repetitive rhythm, another ‘It’s Getting’
Better Man!!!’ rather than another ‘Wonderwall’. Lyrically it seems to be yet
another song of the day Noel met his future wife and his world changed, leading
him to question all sorts of things about the universe and fate and how it’s
made (although his only actual reference to the title is that the man who built
it ‘arrived on a maggot horse’. Make of that what you will, because I certainly
can’t). Alas this is no ‘Masterplan’ but another jumble of garbled poetry: ‘You
and I, spider and the fly, we eat where the shadows fall’. Noel also comes
across the song as a deeply unsavoury character, a wolf out to woo a girl
against her will because he can see how important she’ll become to him – but he’s
already regretting his big move the minute he makes it and is trying to get out
of it. ‘Keep your eyes on the prize if you want it all!’ he urges himself, but
he’s full of doubt and worry, aware that if he does accept this challenge then
he will become like everyone else, sucked into the ‘rat race’ of family and
small talk. Far from being celestial and other-worldly this weird song is just
too earth-bound and smug to work as well as it should. As ever, though, Noel
knows how to make a good stomp beat and this song’s slow icy march does have a
certain something that keeps you listening, it’s just a shame that a better
lyric and tune couldn’t have been placed on top.
The album then ends on ‘End Credits’, which is
basically just a reprise of ‘Interlude’ (confusingly both songs are subtitled ‘Wednesday’
Parts One and Two). We’re clearly meant to think of this album as a movie, with
this the moody music that plays underneath the closing commentary, the
punchline to the rest of the album. Except that it just repeats an instrumental
that wasn’t that interesting in the first place, albeit with added eerie ‘I Am
The Walrus’ strings which work rather well. The tune sounds a little like the
title track too, but that shows just shows up how much the album has run out of
ideas, with this riff not good enough to hold up three songs without variation.
The song is also wrong for the big finale of an album – it doesn’t so much end
as kind of give up, fading away into the darkness. As bad as the other two Noel
solo albums were, at least he knew how to end them – this album just comes to
an abrupt halt.
Most fans surely own the ‘deluxe’ edition anyway,
which is the must-have one to buy courtesy of two of the better songs that are
by far the best recordings, as Noel and an acoustic guitar does so superbly
what a whole thirty-odd string of session musos and a powerhouse production
fails to do: move me. Both ‘Dead In The Water’ and ‘God Help Us All’ are strong
songs from the heart. But if you own the basic version of this album you don’t
get those: instead you get nine songs of a man shouting and no less than three
instrumentals, plus maybe two songs that are kinda listenable. This is hopeless
for a man of Noel’s credentials and I still can’t help but feel that he’s
hiding his ‘real’ self behind something (the surface production mostly) and
that we’ve only seen peeks of the ‘real’ Noel on his solo projects so far. I
fear that one day we’re going to see a nervous breakdown of the ‘what was I
thinking? This isn’t really me’ sort in a few years’ time when this whole
trilogy will be abandoned As a bad idea. Indeed, Noel’s already doing that with
his first two solo albums, which in publicity for this third one he said weren’t
really ‘on it’, even though they were both greeted as his ‘best work since
Morning Glory’ and blah blah blah. Noel can talk the talk like nobody else. I
almost believed him in the run-up to this album as he talked about being
groundbreaking and revolutionary and how he wanted to keep moving on in his
career, without any need to sound like his old band to hold him back anymore.
But take away those guitars and what have you got? Certainly not melody,
certainly not the wit and charm of the old days and most definitely not the
subtlety. Instead you have a man shouting for nearly three-quarters of an hour,
some trendy modern music that comes with a best-before date of round about Christmas
and a girl playing the scissors. Noel has surrounded himself with a whole new
world of people who make modern music and asked them to put him at the heart of
it – the problem is, he doesn’t belong there. He’s not a poetic mystical figure
writing in metaphors and doing crazy things for the hell of it, he’s a realist,
one of the people, who knows how to tap into the social conscious like nobody
else of his era (except Belle and Sebastian, anyway). This album, though, is
more about hiding from the need to write for or recognise anybody, with Noel
literally as far removed from planet earth as he can be given the album title, not
even writing much about himself anymore these days. Noel has talked in
interviews too of how people who diss him all love John and Yoko and can’t see
the hypocrisy in loving a man whose daring to be different. But that’s the
problem: John, with Yoko pushing him, was genuinely trying to be different for
most of the time (and he did mess up on occasion: this album is the ‘Double
Fantasy’ of the Oasis catalogue). Noel sounds like every other awful band around
with a casio keyboard and an amplifier; he just has a bigger budget than most
that’s all. Like the third Oasis album everything is just so overblown and big
and huge that its forgotten how to tell a story – of the whole album there are
only two songs that have anything in them really to discuss. There’s nothing
like the invention or courage of Liam’s album, made against his will because he
would much rather pretend that its 1995 and he’s still part of a band and brand
name, but who dug deep into his psyche and cobbled something together about how
he was feeling (betrayed and confused mostly); Noel quit the group, a few Satsuma
throws later, so that he could do something different. But was the risk really
worth it, ending a band who still had so much potential and so much to offer
for this messy noisy rambling album of nothing? Surely not. It’s hard to know
how Noel feels at all on album that seems to have been designed purely as a
smokescreen to hide his real self behind. The result is one small step for
Noel, but a huge calamity for Oasis fans who can hear this sort of stuff made
better by any amount of unworthy bands. Noel has been many things, but he’s
never been quite so boring before. Who built the moon? Who cares. I care more
about planet Earth and the musicians on it. There is no dark side to ‘Who Built
The Moon?’ really. Matter of fact it’s all dark (and impenetrable).
I don’t get it! Why leave your best
stuff on the ‘deluxe edition’ of an album? Almost the only thing Noel has in
common with Liam is that the best stuff from both their projects came out as
‘extras’. [ ] ‘Dead In The Water’ was recorded in a studio in
Dublin with producer David Holmes listening to Noel singing to his acoustic
guitar and a little bit of piano from Keefus Cianda. An aching, gorgeous
revealing song about wehat happens when you used to be one of the most famous
musicians on the planet but you have to move on with the rest of your life, it
reveals a lot about why parent album ‘Who Built The Moon?’ turned out the way
it did. Noel once had an ‘empire’ but he built it on sand and he’s watched it
‘disappear under the waves’. As it sinks, he thinks back to a time when that
empire never existed, back when he ‘had no money’ but at least he had hope back
then and time to make things happen. Now he has neither and he wishes that he’d
paid more attention to his riches and fame and enjoyed it more when he had the
chance. Now he’s left trying to scratch a living to earn enough for a treat, to
buy his loyal wife a ‘bottle of wine’. He also pleads with her to understand
his desire to keep moving, to keep playing, his desperate need to rebuild that
empire and find the ‘promised land’ he’s felt calling to him his whole life
through. For now, though, he’s doing all he can just to survive, aware that he
is ‘dead in the water’ but promising to fight back, to ‘die in the waves’ as he
swims against the current of his career going nowhere. The performance is
gorgeous so you can see why it was kept from what was basically a demo: Noel’s
vocal is fabulous, a great mixture of bravado, arrogance and fragility, the
sound of a king dethroned who doesn’t know whether to go quietly with the
revolutionaries or fight back. This song’s latest Beatles reference: ‘I’m fixing
a hole in my head where the rain gets in’. Superb. More like this please Noel! Find it on: the deluxe edition of ‘Who Built The Moon?’
(2017)
Less
revealing but every bit as special is a second acoustic song taped live in the
studio and featuring Noel’s vocal unadorned by extra at last. [ ] ‘God Help Us All’ sounds at one with the under-rated Noel B-sides
from the last eight years or so of Oasis’ lifetime. Noel is distraught, he sees
confusion and hopelessness everywhere he goes and it feels like the end of days
are coming. He may even be contemplating suicide (‘Don’t wait for me if I’m not
here when you return!’) and admits he’ll
‘go insane’ if ‘you don’t speak my name’, desperate to be relevant, to be
important the way he used to be. The title is, of course, ironic: there is no
God to help us and if there is one he’s ‘crashing while we burn’, as if we’re
in a computer programme that’s suffering a glitch. There’s a gorgeously
haunting refrain that comes from someone howling like a werewolf treated with
echo, which adds an eerie coda to the song. Like many a Noel track, though, it’s
still looking to be happy and resolve itself from this minor chord prison. ‘Sing
it out, sha la la la la’ Noel sings joyously, like Paul Weller covering The
Kinks, but this little bit of oasis in a storm of life’s making isn’t fooling
anyone. Unlike most of ‘Who Built The Moon?’ this is a track that knows just
how hard life is and is pretty darn good at conveying that emotion in song.
Again, more like this please Noel! Find it
on: the deluxe edition of ‘Who Built The Moon?’ (2017)
A Now Complete List Of
Oasis and Related Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'Definitely Maybe' (1994) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-views-and-music-issue-105-oasis.html
'(What's The Story?) Morning Glory' (1995) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/oasis-whats-story-morning-glory-1996.html
'The Masterplan' (B sides compilation) (1998) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-99-oasis-masterplan-1998.html
'Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants' (1999) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/news-views-and-music-issue-44-oasis.html
'Definitely Maybe' (DVD soundtrack) (2000) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-2-oasis.html
‘Heathen Chemistry’ (2002) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/oasis-heathen-chemistry-2002.html
‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ (2005) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/oasis-dont-believe-truth-2005.html
'Dig Out Your Soul' (2008) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/05/oasis-dig-out-your-soul-2008-heavily.html
'Different Gear, Still Speeding' (Beady Eye) (2011) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/news-views-and-music-issue-93-beady-eye.html
'Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' (2011) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-119-noel.html
‘Be’ (Beady Eye) (2013) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/beady-eye-be-2013-album-review.html
'Chasing Yesterdays' (Noel Gallagher's High Flying
Birds) (2015) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/noel-gallaghers-high-flying-birds.html
As You Were (Liam Gallagher) (2017) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/liam-gallagher-as-you-were-2017.html
Who Built The Moon? (Noel Gallagher’s High Flying
Birds) (2017) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/noel-gallaghers-high-flying-birds-who.html
Why Me? Why Not! (Liam Gallagher, 2019) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/09/liam-gallagher-why-me-why-not-2019.html
The Best Unreleased Oasis Recordings 1992-2013 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-best-unreleased-recordings-1992.html
Surviving TV Clips 1994-2009: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-surviving-tv-clips-1994-2009.html
Compilation/Live/Solo Albums: 1994-2010 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-compilationliveb-sides-albums.html
Non-Album Songs Part One: 1993-1998
Non-Album Songs Part Two: 2000-2015
Landmark Concerts and Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/oasis-five-landmark-concerts-and-three.html
Essay: Living Forever – Where Did It All Go Wrong? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/oasis-essay-living-forever-where-did-it.html
