Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
The Hours
Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011
The Orpheum Theatre
Better than: Standing among shouty drunks at a European soccer match.
Since Oasis' Gallagher brothers are apparently determined to not get along -- the famously disagreeable Mancs scuttled their titanic Britpop band after an alleged backstage altercation in 2009 -- we're going to have to take them separately. Bummer. Both put out new solo records this year that roughly approximate their complementary attitudes and talents: Brash, mouthy singer Liam put out a record as Beady Eye that's all swoon, swagger, and '60s rock poses -- it's fun but fluffy, and sometimes annoying. Noel, the elder brother and Oasis' chief songwriter, delivered a solo debut under the name Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds that's precise, studied, subtly gorgeous, and not a little predictable.
On Saturday, San Francisco greeted Noel like a victorious general, with shouts, chants, huge applause, and the unmistakable air of adoration. Gallagher, droll, brief of word, and sarcastic, played it cool but also delivered a satisfying set of 20 songs, including all the best from his solo debut, as well as enough Oasis cuts to send the fans into starry-eyed '90s ecstasy.
Dressed in a white button-up shirt tucked into gray Levis, Gallagher doesn't quite look 44 years old, but he does behave like a rock star: He took delivery of a new guitar between every song of the main set, sometimes trading for an axe identical to the one in his hands. (The point was to stay in tune, but it still looked funny.) After the first song, he marched over to give the monitor mixer a talking-to that looked like it must have involved more than a few nasty words. He wasn't exactly warm to the crowd, either: Gallagher peppered his banter with jokes -- we hope they were jokes -- bitching about how the top balcony of the room wasn't full, and thanked the audience "for all the money" at the end. (Tickets were a stiff $50-$75 before fees.)
The music said enough. Some of the songs on Noel's solo debut date back to Oasis' days on the top of the charts and the critics' lists -- he just hadn't put them out yet -- and are commensurate in quality. Whenever it was written, "Dream On" could be a new "Hey Now" -- it unfolds into a cinematic, soaring chorus -- and it hit live with 10 times the anthem power of its recorded version. "If I Had a Gun," too, is a beautiful, slow-burning love song. Like a lot of Gallagher's tunes, it isn't flashy, but it is kinda obvious: One can easily guess his lyrics based on the rhyme scheme alone, and he's almost comically over-reliant on words like "sea," "eyes," "soul," "love," and whatever one-syllable word rhymes with the one he just sang.
Much of the time, this tendency doesn't hurt his music. "The Death of You and Me" is full of storm clouds, "you," "me," "free," and "soul," but the recorded version spices up the tepid words with a funky New Orleans brass band bit (that Gallagher's keyboardist -- MVP band member of the evening -- alluded to on Saturday with a boogie-woogie piano solo). Those smoky vibes worked even better onstage than they do on the recording. Unfortunately, Noel's solo album also includes a couple throwaways like "The Good Rebel," which is four and a half minutes of him repeatedly stretching out the word "rain" like it's a rubber band he means to break.
The funniest presentation of all of Gallagher's new solo songs came, unintentionally, with the vaguely disco-flavored "AKA...What A Life," which in his universe counts as dance music. Gallagher, as he puts it, "can't dance." Despite this, we were sincerely hoping he would acknowledge the pulsing beat of one of his favorite new songs with some rhythmic body motion, however slight. But no: As the ever-standing crowd swayed along, Gallagher stood stoically behind his guitar with not even a hint of horizontal movement, let alone anything resembling dancing. You can buy the Brit a drum machine, but, well.
Rivaling any of the new stuff, of course, were the versions of Oasis songs -- both classics like "Supersonic," "Wonderwall," and "Don't Look Back in Anger," and lesser-known tunes like "Talk Tonight." (Which Gallagher said was written about a night in San Francisco.) These of course made us painfully miss the glorious early period of Oasis, the heyday of Britpop, and -- more abstractly -- the days when there were still young snotty rock bands writing huge, obvious three-chord rock songs and launching into megastardom with them.
Although he played "Wonderwall" alone with an acoustic, Gallagher closed out the night with a full-band version of "Don't Look Back in Anger." Fueled by a backline of British Hiwatt amps, the song was buoyed by snarling guitars and filled with memorable hooks that had seemingly everyone singing along and grinning stupidly. It's too bad that the Gallaghers can't grapple with the stink of their respective shits and make music together. But even if that never happens, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds are a fine substitute.
Opener the Hours is the project of Antony Genn and Martin Slattery, two veterans of the Britpop world who've played with Pulp, Elastica, and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, among others. The band sounded great onstage -- clearer than the headliner -- and gave its soft rock sound a good showing. Genn's voice takes some getting used to -- it's princely and operatic in a way that only British males can be. Coupled with extremely earnest, sometimes cliche-filled lyrics ("People say I'm a dreamer"; "I want to suck out all the marrow"; etc.) the whole thing can feel a bit belabored. It can also sound way too much like U2. But high-energy numbers like "Ali in the Jungle" seemed to make an indifferent crowd sit up (not stand) and pay attention.
Critic's Notebook
Freak show: Standing (staggering) next to me was a wiry middle-aged British man who stumbled, fell, and shouted reverently throughout the entire show like he'd just come from a bar where they pump whisky into your veins through an IV while making you listen to "God Save the Queen" on repeat. He shouted at me a couple times in what sounded like a British accent that'd reached psychedelic levels of intoxication, but I couldn't make out a single word. The fact that at one point he fell over onto my feet, nearly hitting his half-bald head onto a seat back, didn't stop him from continuing to sway and wave his arms madly. The man on the other side of him, another solo Brit who'd just bought a ticket off a scalper, glared at the crazy guy like he was a national embarrassment.
The crowd: My plus-one for Saturday night was my middle-aged, Britpop-loving uncle, and, well, he didn't feel out of place.
The sound: Was somehow fantastic for the opener and muddy for Gallagher. For the first three songs you nearly couldn't make out a single word he was saying.
Oh, and: Noel played a new piece of swirling, blaring psychedelia called "Freaky Teeth," which he said will be on his new record with the stoners behind Amorphous Androgynous. It was one of the best songs of the night.
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