by Oliver on September 5, 2023 in Album
Six years after the streaky Who Built the Moon? sweep Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds back with a surprisingly nondescript album: these Council Skies are strangely unspecific places of longing.
Noel captures the spirit behind his fourth quasi-solo album „…going back to the beginning. Daydreaming, looking up at the sky and wondering about what life could be…“ and, following this vague image in his mind’s eye, he recorded music that was melancholic and shaped by memories of his own childhood, just as the songs he wrote during the pandemic wanted to be understood as a comforting balm for the soul.
Wo We’re Gonna Get There in the End as a wonderful standalone single because it’s already too tangibly contoured for the regular album, and actually also the one built with Johnny Marr on an electro beat, switching to herbs, making the tempo Pretty Boy as a too penetrating yeah vulnerability (nevertheless winning in context) on the wrong track Council Skies the typical Noel songwriting built on a warm 60s and 70s affine atmosphere that of I’m Not Giving Up Tonight pleasantly half-awakening with slow-paced acoustic folk flair and dream-walking reveling string arrangements, rhythmically mostly working according to well-known Chris Sharrock patterns (i.e. often stomping) but with the romantic dreamy sound every traditional rock feeling is padded with hippie nostalgia, modestly and gently remaining dissolving, even in the theoretically pompous scenes so rather remains reserved.
Songs like the completely decelerated reverie Dead to the Worldcaressing from its ethereal arrangements and gentle harmonic changes to the magically uplifting chorus, the velvet paw pounding Open the Door, See What You Find have something hymn-like about them, articulate it in the character of Council Skies but in a way that is never quite tangible, ringing as an airy anachronism of slightly swaying fantasies, which in the case of the calmly comforting indulgence Trying to Find a World That’s Been and Gone Pt. 1 (which begins more like an interlude that is not fully formulated) or the elegiac and gripping one Easy Now may seem underwhelming at first glance, but gradually reveal that Noel and his band – alongside guest Marr and drummer Sharrock, bassist Russell Pritchard, keyboardist Mike Rowe, Gem Archer (guitar), and co-producer Paul “Strangeboy” Stacey, who contributes an ambient solo in the last-named song – instead of the hits this time he opted for relatively inconspicuous catchy tunes, which, if necessary, sneak out of the thoughts for a moment.
Noel sings lines like “I can lend you a dream/ ‚Til we meet again/…/ But if love ain’t enough/ To make it alright/ Leave me dead to the world/ ‚Cause I’m sleeping/…/ I’m so tired/ Let these be my last words‘ and shows a forgiving mildness.
When subtly danceable grooves emerge like in the title track, it happens with vager Doves-Association in a way that is just as subtle as when Think of a Number as an amalgam from Bowie Ashes to Ashes, The morning (Gorillaz), The Cure-Vibe, U2’s Staring at the Sun and Oasis‚ Falling Down pleases. In the end it is perhaps enough as a symbol for this secret grower of an album that at times ripples latently no matter how the closer finds a sublime majesty, but does not focus it, but lets it slip through his fingers noncommittally. Which in a way also has a frustrating undertone of informality, but the fourth album of the High Flying Birds also lends a seductively unfathomable character all of its own, with plenty of substance beneath the dozing forms.
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