'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. Released on Fri 24 November 2017 on Sour Mash, the keenly
anticipated follow-up to the platinum-selling, Chasing Yesterday
(2015).
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 ain) 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 pl 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.
David Holmes, Producer of Who Built The Moon? says: “People are
going to be surprised. I think people love Noel and they’re
desperate for him to make a really big, bold, up-tempo beast of a
record – a lot of Noel’s music is quite mid-tempo. This one is
fun.”
How would Gallagher respond to control room commands to: “Stop
‘playing’ guitar!” and “Play me a guitar solo you can dance to!”?
Secure in the knowledge that the man challenging him had a vision
to match his undimmed ambition, he entered the same, inventive
space. The Man Who Built The Moon crystallises an outsider’s view
of the partnership, flooded with lush orchestration and a sense
of looming drama. It is the sound of an experienced songwriter
supported by an accomplice similarly striving meticulously for
perfection, as Gallagher reveals:
“We took a keyboard riff we liked from an unused track and added
chords. A year later we came to deal with it as a song and when
we got to the chorus, David kept asking me to write a new
one….again and again and again. I was ready to strangle him. The
one that you hear is the eighth attempt and, you know what? The
annoying thing is he was right.”
On blue-touch-paper track, Fort Knox, barely a note is sung by
Gallagher, instead toying with euphoric incantations, while It’s
A Beautiful World bubbles with progressive, ambient electronica.
Black & White Sunshine’s 60s, psychedelic pop canvasses for
more traditionalist votes while Holy ain is a game of ‘spot
the obscure sample’ amidst a joyous wall of sound. Symptomatic of
the unhurried back and forth between him and Holmes, Gallagher
says of the latter track:
“David played me the sample, so I worked out the chords and we
demoed just a few, short minutes of it, taking it away on tour
and playing with it. When it became a song back in Belfast it was
so joyous, I just had to do it justice. What’s more joyous than
being in love, baby? So, I wrote a song about love and it’s one
of the best things that I’ve ever done.”