Part of the brilliance of Oasis was that it shed a light on two of rock’s great curmudgeons. After all, there are few things the media (and yeah, the public) clings to like an acerbic celebrity. Post-Oasis, Noel Gallagher has more or less sustained his career off his caustic wit, hopping from junket to junket on the good faith he’ll spill at least one quote worth printing.
It started with the on-stage battles with his brother and fellow Oasis member Liam Gallagher that led to the band’s demise, a sideshow that garnered as much press as their apparent masterpiece, “Whatap The Story (Morning Glory)?.” But with Oasis’ slacker underdog messages falling flat on millennial ears, that album’s legacy lives on solely via “Wonderwall” covers at a quad near you. As such, Gallagher is known more for sound bytes than songs—but considering his talent for slander, it’s not for nothing. (On Liam: “He’s rude, arrogant, intimidating and lazy. He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”)
The irony is, Gallagher’s actual music is a far cry from the antagonism that flows so freely when he’s sat in front of a tape recorder. On a studio mic, he falls into a radio rock daze, ushering in rhythms easily swapped for steering-wheel finger drumming and lyrics that as he admits, he doesn’t
Taken all at once, this bodes poorly for his latest release. To its credit, Gallagher’s second solo album with the High Flying Birds, “Chasing Yesterday,” does confound expectations, if only for a moment. The album sprawls open with a six-minute toast to 60’s-psych sensibilities in “Riverman,” which strikes an admirable balance between a lean single and hair-down jam, thanks in part to a couple of funk solos (one on sax, no less). It makes for the “Champagne Supernova” of this album, in spirit and quality, and while far from perfect, registers as a welcome surprise.
Unfortunately, itap also a head-fake. No amount of jazz-lite (see: “The Right Stuff”) can disguise the fact that the majority of “Chasing Yesterday” is color-by-numbers radio rock with few redeeming passages, let alone songs. “Lock The Doors,” for example, is every bit indicative of the album’s woes as it is a pastiche of every Top-40 90s rock song ever cut, complete with the brick wall of sound Oasis wrought upon the recorded world. “In The Heat Of The Moment” does offer a competent rock anthem innocuous enough to land it on a FIFA soundtrack, but itap nothing that Kaiser Chiefs or Arctic Monkeys haven’t already done better.
Then there’s the lyrics. Itap probably best to pay them no mind, as Gallagher has suggested, lest you find yourself whispering lines like “the cold against my shoulder seems to last forever / and it makes me want to cry” into the ear of your beloved. Even if you were to write them off and reduce all its lyrics to melodic stopgaps, there’s still a general lack of inspiration here thatap much harder to excuse. Maybe itap a symptom of “Chasing Yesterday”’s pre-occupation with the past, hinted at in songs titled in tribute to music legends (“While The Song Remains The Same,” “Riverman,”), riffs written in the spirit of older hits and the odd run at “Stairway To Heaven” in “Girl With X-Ray Eyes.” Itap a shame, too: If he could bottle a fraction of the creative candor he shows between quotation marks, Gallagher might realize he doesn’t need to plumb the past to make a great album for today’s listeners. In fact, he’d be better off leaving it behind.
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Dylan Owens writes album reviews, essays and features for Reverb. You can read more from him on , or the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
