Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built the Moon?

The Guardian 80

(Ignition Records)

The third record from Noel Gallagher’s solo outfit is, according to the ex-Oasis man, merely him in “more colourful clothes”. Brightness is certainly the first thing that strikes you about Who Built the Moon, an album that cloaks Gallagher’s hardy guitar-pop in glowing Smithsian riffs, tin whistle samples from novelty 60s tunes and a heady fug of riotous glam rock. Particular highlights include the gloriously Slade-esque Holy Mountain and the singalong-friendly Black and White Sunshine, which resembles Oasis basking on a sun lounger. Even the fact that the album regularly recalls some of the duller post-Britpop bands – It’s a Beautiful World is basically an Elbow track backed by a breakbeat – can’t dampen the joy that rings out from every corner. Producer David Holmes may be responsible for Noel’s change of pace, but the vibrancy and strains of psychedelia never feel like intruders: instead, they act as the perfect foil for the record’s blissed-out lyrics about life-changing love.

Pitchfork 71

Noel Gallagher’s latest is the most ambitious of his solo releases, internalizing the heyday of late ’90s Britpop while sounding both urgent and absurd to mostly great effect.

Drowned In Sound 60

We really do hear him scream - on tracks like ‘Keep On Reaching’ (don’t worry, Oasis fans - the titles are all as comfortingly banal as one might expect) where huge banks of horns collide with Spector wall of sound drums and shouted, snarled vocals from the 50-year old dad-rocker. His voice apes that of The Vaccines’ Justin Hayward-Young on single ‘Holy Mountain’. His garage rock wail crashes over a glam rock stomp leading to a chorus that’s irresistibly similar to disco hit ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’. This is not usual. This is not the middle-of-the-road rock n’ roll we’ve come to expect and, quietly, accept from Noey-Gs.

This must be, in large part, due to the guiding hand of producer David Holmes. Perhaps in a partial attempt to reignite his creativity in the way Paul Weller (who guests briefly on the aforementioned ‘Holy Mountain’) has in recent years, or even in a grandiose gesture mirroring Primal Scream’s recreation at the hands of Andrew Weatherall on Screamadelica, Gallagher has allowed his steady, formulaic musical foundations to be torn away and has been led to higher ground by Holmes’ guiding hand. The results are outlandish and peculiar.

On ‘It’s A Beautiful World’, which briefly recalls his big-beat collaboration with Chemical Brothers on ‘Setting Sun’, we get a star-speckled chorus with a muted, loudhailer vocal effect augmented by the rich voice of Le Volume Curbe singer Charlotte Marionneau. “Do it like a dance” Gallagher demands…sexily? The melancholic, drawling guitar line courtesy of ex-Beady Eye fella Gem Archer is beguiling; the song as a whole a profoundly unexpected but not unpleasant experience.

‘She Taught Me How To Fly’ hints at Gallagher’s straight-ahead rock past before squirling off into space with a multi-tracked, almost ethereal vocal line set against New Order drum machinery and a Peter Hook-y bassline that carries the rest of the song along on its broad shoulders.

Lyrically of course there’s nothing much to be gained here. “So put your money where your mouth is / If you know where to draw the line” is about the standard of couplet we’re given along with throwaway nonsense like “No need to shout / What you bitchin’ about?” (‘Holy Mountain’). Yet that’s to be expected. There’s at least one interesting line in the shape of “I’ll sing a song of love and you can teach me what you know of death” (‘It’s A Beautiful World’) but it stands out like a clown at a funeral. Or, you know, whatever the opposite of that is.

Words ain’t the thing here, that’s for sure. It’s this big, bold, brash production and this array of sonic left turns that are capable of leaving the listener reeling.

‘The Man Who Built The Moon’ begins as an epic, space-rock stormer that would appear to defy description. But let’s try, eh? An off-kilter, Queen-penned video game soundtrack song? A power-prog explosion fed through an off-kilter Nineties dance mincer? It backs off into a trad rock corner before bursting out of the blocks again, horrifically melodramatic and in sharp contrast to Gallagher’s “We never should have left town in the first place” platitudes. It is, quite frankly, fucking nuts.

But is it any good? IS IT? Well, the Roddy Frame-sounding, Johnny Marr-guesting ‘If Love Is The Law’ holds the record’s most melancholic and masterful melody - in fact, it’s bloody lovely; ‘Black And White Sunshine’ soars and swoops just where it needs to with a Smithsy guitar chime and further lyrical banality (“the weight of the world is dragging me down, down, down.”). So there are moments when simple sense can be made and one can ascribe straightforward terms like ‘decent song’ and ‘not a bad track, that’ to them. Yet they are few and far between.

Instrumental interludes like, er, ‘Interlude’ and ‘End Credits’ (that one’s at the end, folks) stir the pot further - pastoral, proggy and somehow serene they contrast almost comically with the frantic world-building of the rest of the record.

Gallagher has, for the most part, shed his retro skin and Oasis go-to moments here - often at the expense of things people really like such as recognisable melodies, big tunes and predictable chord changes performed by predictable band blokes. The moments of recognisably female voice contributions provided by the aforementioned Marionneau and session singers (deep breath) Michelle John, Janet Ramos, Una McGeough, Georgina McGeough, Audrey Gbaguidi, Beverley Skeete, Sara-Jane Skeete, Mary Pearce and Adelaide McKenzie are a welcome respite from that approach. Also to be praised is Emre Ramazanoglu for the programming and percussion skills that help lift this record out of the ordinary.

Though of course it has Gallagher’s name on it and he’s the guy with the songs, this feels like Holmes’ record - a studio-created melting pot of awkward approaches, inspired instrumentation, the occasional colossal flop and a few genuinely unique moments. More power to Gallagher for giving him the reigns here and allowing himself to be guided into territory that’s often fresh, sometimes really interesting but, above all, utterly atypical and bizarre.

It’s worth a listen.