Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds: Chasing Yesterday review - unready for takeoff

Last October, Noel Gallagher’s second solo album was announced via a Facebook Q&A with fans. As ever in interviews, the elder Gallagher was on fine, bullish form, describing the recent reissue of Definitely Maybe as “money for old fucking rope”, dismissing the suggestion that he should give his new album away for free (“If anything I want to put the prices up”) and talking intriguingly about its contents. The phrase “space jazz” was mentioned; the presence of saxophones was alluded to; he expected audiences to be bamboozled. They might, he suggested, think: “Fucking hell, he’s gone insane, what’s he done there?”

It’s with these words ringing in your ears that you play Chasing Yesterday, and discover that the opening track, Riverman, commences with acoustic guitar chords to which you could happily sing Wonderwall and a lyrical reference to the Beatles: “Something in the way she moves drives me to distraction.” At this point, the listener expecting insanity and space jazz might well feel driven to distraction themselves: it’s hard to stop an involuntary groan springing from your lips. In fairness, Riverman does feature a saxophone, albeit a saxophone used in the most Noel Gallagherish manner imaginable – to make his song sound exactly like someone else’s. Gallagher has suggested the instrument’s presence should transport listeners back to “a smoky club in 1963”, but the moment on Riverman where the drums drop out, the guitar plays a gentle arpeggio and the sax starts blowing lazily seems more likely to transport them back to Abbey Road studios in 1975, at the precise moment when Pink Floyd were engaged in recording the bit, eleven and half minutes into Shine On You Crazy Diamond, where the drums drop out, the guitar plays a gentle arpeggio and the sax starts blowing lazily.

He would obviously never have admitted it, but it was hard not to draw the conclusion that the good bits of Gallagher’s last album were powered by a desire both to prove himself – the lyrics were the usual river of drivel, but the tunes were uniformly more memorable than anything he’d come up with on his former band’s last few albums – and establish that a Noel Gallagher solo album didn’t necessarily mean a pale imitation of Oasis, but an opportunity to do things he felt unable to do in Oasis. It seemed revealing that the track that incurred his younger brother’s most colourful scorn was the house-influenced …AKA What a Life!, which was also the best thing on it, precisely because you could never imagine Oasis doing anything like it.

There was the prospect of a second album recorded with Amorphous Androgynous, the psychedelic alter-ego of techno duo the Future Sound of London, who had previously come up with an astonishing 22-minute-long remix of Oasis’s Falling Down. The first track that emerged from the sessions, Shoot a Hole Into the Sun, was genuinely experimental in a way that no Oasis record had ever been: a sprawl of tumbling percussion, electronic effects and fractured, echoing vocals.

Now, though, with another platinum album in the bag, the sense that Gallagher feels the need to prove himself has, perhaps understandably, evaporated. The songwriting on Chasing Yesterday is audibly less consistent than on its predecessor. There are great moments here: the Mellotron-assisted drift of The Girl With X-Ray Eyes; While the Song Remains the Same, which shifts from an ambient intro to a weirdly compelling, reverb-swathed shuffle; Ballad of the Mighty I, bolstered by a Johnny Marr solo and a melody every bit as stubbornly ineradicable as it was the day Graham Gouldman wrote it for the Hollies’ 1966 hit Bus Stop. But for every one of them, there’s a song so nondescript it seems to evaporate as it leaves the speakers: the Kasabianish In the Heat of the Moment, the turgid rock plod of The Mexican, The Dying of the Light, a stadium rock ballad that Noel Gallagher seems to have been writing – and indeed releasing – for well over a decade now.

Elsewhere, there’s something a little telling about the fact that one of the best tracks, Lock All the Doors, is a Definitely Maybe-era cast-off. Complete with a knowing steal from David Essex’s Rock On. It’s really good, but once you know its origins, you can’t help wistfully imagining it sung in a Liamish sneer, backed with a thick wall of Never Mind the Bollocks-inspired guitars: it makes you wish you were listening to Oasis, which surely isn’t what a Noel Gallagher solo album sets out to achieve. The Right Stuff, meanwhile, makes you wish you were listening to a different album entirely. A refugee from the long-abandoned sessions with Amorphous Androgynous, it’s both flatly brilliant and entirely different from anything Gallagher has released before: over-muted horns and flourishes of Rick Wright-ish organ, a female vocalist takes the lead on everything but the middle eight and a bass clarinet plays a remarkably abstract solo. It’s presumably the “space jazz” to which Gallagher was referring. Sun Ra fans might balk at that description, but it’s still a tantalising suggestion that Gallagher is entirely capable of making a more interesting album than Chasing Yesterday if he wanted to.

But he obviously doesn’t want to, and the question of why hangs a little heavy. Gallagher and Amorphous Androgynous have offered wildly differing versions of what went wrong with their collaboration, but it’s hard not to think the key phrase in the whole argument belongs to Gallagher: “I couldn’t be arsed.” Perhaps that’s not such a shock. Chasing Yesterday really isn’t a bad album as such: it’s alright, it has its moments, it’ll do. And it’s clearly going to sell: Noel Gallagher has never released an album that hasn’t gone platinum in his entire 22-year career.

To borrow a phrase from the old advert for Denim aftershave, he’s a man who doesn’t have to try too hard. Whether that means he shouldn’t is open to question.