Beady Eye
Different Gear, Still Speeding

A complex that has followed Liam Gallagher for years, the complex of someone who cannot step out of the shadow of his older brother, the one who is always more prepared, more experienced, more talented.

“The Beady Eye will be more rock than Oasis.” That’s actually true, but Liam clearly overlooks a small detail: the more talented is not the one who creates more noise, but the one who makes more music. By immediately stating that “Different Gear, Still Speeding” is inferior to all previous works written with his brother (mostly written by his brother), I confirm the limits of the younger Gallagher.

The opening tracks “Four Letter Word” and “Millionaire” are convincing, the latter from the first chord is evidently of ‘Beatles-like’ influence, with that 60’s cadence that’s surprising to think it’s a piece written in 2010. The first real predictable attempt to imitate Oasis’s style comes already with track no. 3, the single, already heavily played on radio and TV, is indeed a callback to the past, but it plays on the same winning notes ‘by Gem Archer old style’ complete with accompanying piano.
It continues with “Beatles And Stones,” that Liam is monotonous was already known, but that he would invoke his idols directly in the title of the piece was unexpected; the track is simple and practically one-stanza, it personally recalls in structure “The Meaning Of Soul” a piece he wrote for Oasis in 2005. After the repeated and repetitive “Come on, come on” of “Wind Up Dream,” we arrive at the second noteworthy piece of the album, and the first single taken from the album, “Bring The Light,” which with its ‘old English’ style, this time well-executed, brings the album back to decent levels. Probably the truly unexpected negative note of the album is that the absence of Noel in composition reveals not only a predictable compositional scarcity of Liam but also mediocre work from the rest of the band, which makes tracks like “Kill For A Dream” and “Wigwam” somewhat predictable. In between the two songs, however, the good “Standing On The Edge Of Noise” stands out with a well-accepted ‘Roll With It’ effect. The closing belongs to two slow songs, “The Beat Goes On” and “The Morning Son,” with an effectively melancholic cadence that does not spoil the overall album.

Confirming the considerations made at the beginning, good Liam Gallagher with this album seems to admit his limitations as a songwriter, proving and certifying that he will always remain in the shadow of the ‘big brother,’ accompanied by the remaining Beady Eye who merely execute a task just good enough to pass, a task that, facing the presumptuous statements during the ‘work in progress,’ really feels like too little.

“Different Gear, Still Speeding,” has the partial extenuation of being an album released a few decades late, whose title if one wanted to translate it as ‘different equipment, same speeding excess’, would have validity only in grammar and form, the substance instead firmly says otherwise.