Noel Gallagher - Who Built The Moon (2017) [Official Digital Download]

While flowing from the same, molten core of melody, songwriting craft and towering self-belief, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ new album, "Who Built The Moon?" alters the legendary singer-songwriter’s course following a bracing, two-year creative collaboration with renowned producer, DJ and composer, David Holmes. Bursting bubbles of perception, drilling dynamite into cracks between past and present and painting a daring portrait of the artist as a free man, Who Built The Moon? gathers vocalists and guest musicians from around the world to breathe life into 11 tracks finely poised between experimental and a jukebox of ageless influence. Meeting to work in Belfast and London, Gallagher and Holmes tuned into French psychedelic pop as much as classic electro, soul, rock, disco and dance on a cultured adventure into recorded sound.

If tracks blipping with ethereal, electronic experimentation and French spoken word start rumours of Gallagher’s restlessness, then instrumentals drifting with a latent, melancholic energy, inspired by European television soundtracks confirm them. Setting fire to familiarity, Gallagher wrote entirely in the studio for the first time, leaping into laboratory conditions and a cut and paste adventure with Holmes, turning his back, at least temporarily, on studied solitude and six strings. The studio door was left open for Paul Weller (organ on Holy Mountain) and Johnny Marr (guitar and harmonica on If Love Is The Law) to not only bear witness to, but make a mark on a pivotal moment in Gallagher’s ten studio album career.

The results are exhilarating. Setting the placid instrumentals and hypnotic, eastern-influenced grooves alongside gutsy balcony-shakers and widescreen, cinematic walls of sound, Who Built The Moon? is an album for the apocalypse, comforting queasy listeners with shades of the Noel Gallagher they rely on, while taking the adventurous dancing with him into the flames.

It's hard to blame Noel Gallagher for opting for stability over adventure once he disbanded Oasis. After spending nearly 20 years battling his brother Liam, he needed to take things easy, and if his solo records – Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds (2011) and Chasing Yesterday (2015) – were a little too calm, consider it a consequence of navigating himself out of chaos. Despite achieving solo success, Gallagher seemed to have a nagging voice in the back of his head that he'd ceded the psychedelic ground he claimed at the height of Brit-pop. That voice began to beckon when he first launched his solo career, leading him to cut an album with trippy production team Amorphous Androgynous in 2011 but, unsatisfied with the results, he scrapped the project. Gallagher finally figured out how to reconnect with the part of him that sang with Chemical Brothers in 2017, when he teamed up with fellow '90s survivor producer/composer David Holmes for Who Built the Moon? Opening with the Technicolor pulse of "Fort Knox" – a swirling near-instrumental that deliberately recalls "F***** in the Bushes" – Who Built the Moon? announces itself as a noisier, busier record than either of its predecessors but by the time the stomping "Holy Mountain" kicks in, it's clear that Gallagher and Holmes are engaging in a decidedly retro notion of the future, one that looks back to the '90s looking back at the '60s. This has been Noel's stock in trade since the start, but during Oasis' heyday, he'd undercut his conservatism by making a great, bloody racket and writing melodies that sliced into the subconscious – calling cards he neglected in his bid from maturation. Who Built the Moon? happily restores these elements to the equation, marrying it to his refined sense of songcraft. Gallagher may not precisely serve up surprises here – Holmes adds some attractive, quirky flair on the margin, but he's working with sounds Noel endorsed in the first act of his career – but there is a certain rush hearing him opt for glam, psychedelia, and candied pop instead of respectable strumming. Once that initial rush fades, the album is still satisfying due to its impeccable execution. Noel knows how to construct a sturdy song and Holmes knows how to dress them up in flashy clothes, and the combination results in Gallagher's best album since splitting up Oasis.

Tracklist:

01 - Fort Knox
02 - Holy Mountain
03 - Keep On Reaching
04 - It's A Beautiful World
05 - She Taught Me How To Fly
06 - Be Careful What You Wish For
07 - Black & White Sunshine
08 - Interlude (Wednesday Part 1)
09 - If Love Is The Law
10 - The Man Who Built The Moon
11 - End Credits (Wednesday Part 2)
12 - Dead In The Water (Live at RTÉ 2FM Studios, Dublin) [Bonus Track]

Produced by David Holmes. Mixed and Engineered by Emre Ramazanoglu.
Recorded at Drama Studios, Belfast, The Pool and Hoxa HQ, London.
All lead vocals recorded by Paul ’Strangeboy’ Stacey at Strangeways Studios, London.
Mastered by John Davis at Metropolis, London.



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