High Flying Birds In The Silence Before The Storm

Noel Gallagher

As much as I love this season, these really are the dog days of summer, especially musically.  The past week has seen a frustrating slew of first singles, first videos, and previews and snippets of long-awaited new albums that are to come only in the fall.  Joining this wait list now is Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.

Noel's hat in the ring is "The Death of You And Me," the first single off his eponymously titled album due out October 17.  While brother Liam's Beady Eye fired their opening shots with the swaggering "Four Letter Word" and followed it up with the slightly more sedate "The Roller" and "Kill For a Dream," Noel seems to have taken the opposite route.  "The Death of You And Me" is a pensive, moody, and very British first introduction with a clever undercurrent of The Beatles' "For The Benefit of Mr. Kite" and some Burt Bacharach thrown in for good measure.  The song would feel very much at home on Oasis' The Masterplan.

(©2011, Sour Mash)



Judging Noel Gallagher's solo work subjectively is going to be a challenge, as I am of the firm belief that he is the most quintessentially and idiosyncratically British songwriter since Ray Davies.  There is a unique and almost nebulous quality about both Gallagher's and Davies' music that seems to render it impossible to have been written by anyone but someone from England.  "The Death of You And Me" certainly perpetuates and confirms that Noel Gallagher trademark.