Noel Gallaghers High Flying Birds Who Built the Moon Review
It'south 2017: rock music is irrevocably dead. It'south a zombie form, shuffling along with scraps of flesh falling off its crumbling bones. Information technology'due south a bad smell. Such a effigy is terrifying non for whatever destructive ability it might possess, only merely for its uncanny presence: what is it doing here, now? This is non where it belongs. How tin can we escape information technology?
Noel Gallagher'due south High-Flight Birds practise a specially guileless, tub-thumping, broad-strokes version of this pungent, hollowed-out genre. Perhaps this is to be expected – we're talking about a center-aged Manchester City fan who's terminal memorable contribution to his fine art appeared more than 2 decades agone.
There have been children built-in, raised, educated, employed and ruined in the years since Noel Gallagher last released a collection of music that meant anything to people. But, thanks to the regressive cultural fourth dimension-warp in which nosotros are all trapped, and thank you to the predictability of the British music press, he lingers.
Apparently having been a major effigy in the 1990s is considered reason enough to lavish withal more than fourth dimension and attention on a career that long ago ran out of steam. At this remove, 1996 feels like some other universe entirely.
Who Built The Moon? begins with a pumping, looping track called Fort Knox, which appears tailor-made for the kind of advertisements they show at one-half-time on Sky Sports. It's meant to be energising, a big, dumb statement of intent to kick things off. It builds and builds – at that place's a terribly annoying alert clock ringing through the eye of it – merely doesn't go anywhere. Information technology volition become a familiar feeling.
Almost of the lyrics on Who Built The Moon? seem to be going for a sort of naive, nursery rhyme feeling: repetitive, riddled with stock phrases, wrought in but the most familiar, leaden shapes. They are nearly completely shorn of melody, and whenever ane does appear, information technology is hammered repeatedly until it turns to dust. "The one I honey / The one I love / She is divine / She's out to blow my listen / The 1 I love / The one I dear / She taught me to fly / She taught me how to wing…" Information technology'due south genuinely mind-numbing.
Cause of embarrassment
At that place are musical gestures here that would be a crusade of embarrassment if you heard them played by a gang of black-clad teenagers at a Saturday afternoon battle of the bands in a rural parish hall. In Be Conscientious What You Wish For, a basic do-room lick on the audio-visual guitar intro gives manner to something that is meant to be possessed of a smoky, mechanic blues. Instead, when the vocals starting time matching the guitar – "chick-a-paw" – it is very hard not to express joy. From the music to the lyrics – a platitudinous, over again curiously adolescent, portrait of an outsider – information technology's awkward and childish.
Be Careful What You Wish For is one of several tracks to feature an electronic tint courtesy of producer David Holmes. This typically amounts to some wan backing vocals, a rigid beat, a glitter of synthesised texture. At that place's some flutters of gently warped tape delay in the intros and outros, and a couple of instrumental tracks that don't exercise very much except provide respite from Gallagher's laboured singing. The audio is ultimately, and unintentionally, claustrophobic: the instruments are robbed of any grapheme they might accept had, blunted and compressed into an overstuffed void.
Prefabricated gestures
Information technology's not hard to imagine these songs being played on large festival stages, and not just because it often sounds like they were recorded on i. There's a sense of meaningless spectacle, an opulent ready of prefabricated gestures utterly lacking in ingenuity or imagination, performed for the lack of a better idea. Nada shocks, null stirs.
It's telling that the best song here is an acoustic bonus track, Dead in the Water, recorded live in RTÉ's studios. It's the kind of song that wouldn't even have made a B-side in Gallagher's heyday – and there's an apparently endless train of brilliant-eyed young lads doing this matter on the radio every day of the week – just still the song has more charm and immediacy than anything else to be institute Who Built The Moon? At least at that place'southward personality there, a surprising dose of directness later all the gussied-up inhumanity that preceded it.
"You've got the dear, I've got the brains," Gallagher sings on Black And White Sunshine – off-white plenty, but does anybody have a half-decent tune? Does anyone here take annihilation new or interesting to say? Who Built The Moon? would suggest not. Remove some of the varnish and this record could take been made any fourth dimension in the last 70 years. It's the dried, musty sound of a glorified pub band going through the motions. Stone is dead; this is a pantomime.
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/noel-gallagher-s-high-flying-birds-who-built-the-moon-review-a-dried-up-oasis-of-dross-1.3299720
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