Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
Who Built The Moon?

Let's make a point clear: being a songwriter, having the ability to embed captivating lyrics into well-crafted melodies, doesn't make you a musician. Or rather, it's clear that anyone who writes a song is "producing music," just as it's obvious that anyone performing a live concert, in the midst of their performance, is a "musician." To be intrinsically musicians, however, it's necessary to handle musical material with a certain skill, to have a clear vision of its dynamics, of its mystical structures.

Noel Gallagher, with all due respect to him since the Oasis days, is not a musician. However, he is an artist, who has been able, through his personal conception of music, as simple and rough as it may be, to convey emotions. Noel's songs have always been the most basic thing that could exist in music, but if it's true that an important parameter for measuring the greatness of an artistic work is its impact on the audience, on people, then we are not wrong in saying that Oasis's songs were great ones: as direct as few, they communicated straight to the hearts of people without asking for permission.

After years spent composing songs of this kind, with always moderately good results even in his current solo phase, it was understandable that Noel might have lost inspiration for writing; however, it is neither understandable nor acceptable that he wanted to compensate for this with an invasive, exaggerated production, directed together with a producer not aligned with his compositional spirit (that criminal David Holmes). Fat with studio expedients and lean on ideas, Who Built The Moon? is a confusing, pompous, and inconclusive album. Noel's melodic purity is now overshadowed by maximalist arrangements, akin to those session bands of the eighties, complete with redundant horns and soul choirs: a hard direction to sustain for the simple and, this time, weak melodic threads emanating from Noel's acoustic, which end up being suffocated.

Very little is saved: the blues with exotic shades of "Be Careful What You Wish For" recalls some of the more interesting experiments of Oasis (read: the oriental melodies of "Who Feels Love" and "(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady"), while the echoes of Neil Young (another great source of inspiration forever) in "Black & White Sunshine" and Springsteen in "If Love Is The Law," which is also the best track, sound good. But if we hadn't noted down the sensations provoked by these last songs at the time of listening, we wouldn't know how to report them now: of this album, nothing remains, except a bad impression of having dealt with a cosmic nothing filled with total chaos. We are sure that, buried under layers and layers of instruments, Noel Gallagher's songs, as we have loved them, still exist, full of arrogance and passion. This time, however, the reinvention of our arranger, perhaps also due to poor counsel, doesn't convince at all. A year to forget for the Gallagher Bros.