Review: Liam Gallagher Is More Bark Than Bite on As You Were (2017)

From spin.com

Intentional or not, it was a little suggestive for Liam Gallagher to release his first ever solo album in the same week Oasis’ landmark album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory celebrated its 22nd birthday. Even the most dedicated fans of Britrock’s preeminent feuding brothers acknowledged long ago that they won’t again touch their all-time anthemic heights. And yet lately Liam, 45, feels more ubiquitous than ever. In the past year, he became more famous for withering madcap insults (potato!) than for singing rock songs, attention that drove him to remind us he was still a rock singer. By his own admission, the purpose of making As You Were was to keep him occupied, “rather than sitting at home doing nothing, spouting off on Twitter.”

The final result is an agreeable enough listen, if not as proper fuckin’ mega as its creator would probably like you to think. Having finally decided to own up to his limited songwriting abilities, Gallagher enlisted help, most significantly from pop writer/producer Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow. (Had Noel been the one to hire Adele’s producer you can bet Liam would’ve never let him live it down, though in a year when Kurstin worked with Foo Fighters and Mark Ronson with Queens of the Stone Age, it hardly seems anomalous.) Whether because of the level or the quantity of professionalism, the sound comes through so clean it begins to feel a little stale.

Contrary to popular belief, Gallagher can write a whole song. “Greedy Soul” is the best of the five tracks registered in his name alone, but unsurprisingly he’s better off with help. “Wall of Glass,” a team effort, is the only song to successfully reverse-engineering both halves of Oasis’ magic: brash melodic staying power and brilliantly inane lyrical essence. “And the stone you throw / Will turn back in its path” doesn’t defy gravity and momentum quite the same way as, “Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball,” but the suggestion is there. The pros came up with “Chinatown,” a song that manages to be genuinely cryptic without breaking character, and “Paper Crown,” the sort of faithful midtempo Beatles homage that was the bread, butter, and cheese of old Oasis albums. Of course, the greatest favor Gallagher’s co-writers did him was to accommodate his current vocal range—though he dutifully plays the hits when performing live, they sound a lot more ragged than they used to.

As You Were runs into trouble where it begins to resemble the give-me-one-of-everything pastiche that beset Beady Eye, the group Liam formed with his remaining bandmates after a 2009 falling-out with Noel torpedoed Oasis. The repetitive, top-heavy “I Get By”—a song that rhymes “helter skelter” with “gimme shelter”—is all bark and no bite. Without an equally ego-driven guitarist to offset him, Liam’s vocals take constant precedence. “When I’m in Need” turns to an extended instrumental only when it can’t possibly sustain another chorus.https://www.youtube.com/embed/sfcJ_vhlRfs

The standard album runs 12 songs, but unless you’re listening on vinyl, you’re more likely to encounter the 15-track deluxe edition. It’s apparent why the final songs were cut: “Doesn’t Have to Be That Way” feels like a rough Tame Impala demo, while on “I Never Wanna Be Like You,” Gallager croons, “God squad, peace thought / Supermoons / Fanboys, make noise / Boogaloo,” a string of nonsense presumably harvested from a spam email. At least it doesn’t get worse than a gripe about selfie-takers on “All My People / All Mankind,” a weak ditty whose grandiose title and orchestral arrangement render it kind of pathetic.

It’s tempting to imagine how this album might have been improved, either with a keener eye to rock radio or even just some heavier distortion to blur the boring parts. But isn’t that beside the point? As You Were is a vehicle with which to perpetuate capital-LG Liam Gallagher as he ages, John Lydon-like, into his legacy. Imagine if he’d tried to drop the rock star posture and revive himself as a serious, “adult” singer-songwriter type—unbearable. This is the Liam Gallagher you remember, still willfully pilfering lines and chord progressions, still publicly taking shots at his brother, still closing sets with “Wonderwall.” The only real shock is that, in 2017, I’m not convinced Noel can do better.

Liam Gallagher As You Were (2017)

From pitchfork.com

The debut solo album from the 45-year-old, would-be rock’n’roll savior fails to match the charm of his cantankerous public persona.

Liam Gallagher was made for viral stardom. His flawless insults anticipated an era where celebrity reactions became shorthand for shade, and they’ve mostly been his internet currency until recently. Gallagher started promoting his debut solo album, As You Were, in a very early interview with Britain’s Q magazine last August. It wasn’t his jabs at older brother Noel (“that cunt”) that orbited Twitter, but signs of a more meditative outlook. “I was running on [Hampstead] Heath and I thought, ‘That looks like a nice tree, I’m going to climb that fucking tree,’” he said. “Climbed it and sat there with my hood up for about 10 minutes.” He reached peak dad malapropism back in August, referring to A$AP Rocky as “that bloke, WhatsApp Ricky.” More recently, his theory that real rock stars don’t make tea did big numbers, along with his approach to flying. “I just sit there and stare out the window,” he said. “Pure mind control, mate. I’m a Zen cunt, me.”

The promotional campaign for Gallagher’s solo debut has been going on for 14 months. When critiquing bands’ unwieldy album cycles has become a genre unto itself, it is borderline remarkable that nobody in their right mind would complain if the Liam Gallagher press tour went on forever, lighting up our timelines with a never-ending stream of the 45-year-old bon vivant’s observations on the beautifully mundane. We cannot all spend the afternoon getting drunk in the back of the butcher’s, as he does in that fairytale Q feature, but we can all climb a tree and mellow with age without forsaking our idiosyncrasies. Who really needs a Liam Gallagher solo album? How can you improve on perfection?

But given that rock’n’roll transformed Liam’s life, it’s not surprising that he takes his self-appointed role as its last protector very seriously, though his staunch commitment to Real Rock Music over the last 25 years makes As You Were an interesting contradiction. He’s always accepted his limitations as a songwriter, mostly singing Noel’s songs in Oasis or writing with former Oasis bandmates Gem Archer and Andy Bell in Beady Eye. But those are plausible Proper Band formations. About a third of As You Were was co-written with pop songwriter Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt and produced by Greg Kurstin. There are two songs with no Gallagher writing credit at all. The prospect of a strong Gallagher album—him at the peak of his powers, backed by songwriters who understand how to pair the best of him with punchy production—is tantalizing. But the diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.

As You Were starts promisingly enough. Lead single “Wall of Glass” is easily the record’s best song, cresting on a big, hairy harmonica blast that leers with intent. It’s as much of a hodgepodge as anything on 1997’s abrasively multi-tracked Be Here Now—a wall of guitar, gospel choirs, brass—but it leaves space for Gallagher’s voice to catalyze a snarl of disapproval into the belief that there’s something better just out of reach, that unique quality that’s let him outlast two decades of terrible albums after just two years of great ones. He briefly regains his vocal power here after several years of sounding utterly shagged. But it doesn’t last throughout the record: He sounds uncomfortable at higher tempos (“Greedy Soul,” “You Better Run”) and mawkish on syrupy numbers like “Bold,” a semi-acoustic apology for bad behavior that is neither contrite nor cocky. John Lennon died at 40; at 45, Gallagher has no vocal compass.

His lifelong musical preoccupations are laced through the record: Beatles grandeur (“Paper Crown”), T. Rex (“You Better Run”), self-referential Oasis nods (“For What It’s Worth” sounds like “Stand by Me”). But As You Were lacks direction and plays out as a series of inoffensive dirges. The rocking motion of the raucous “I Get By” makes it feel seasick, and “When I’m in Need” lumbers from stodgy prog madrigal to endless attempts at an ornate pay-off, none of which land. “Paper Crown” sounds like Cast, “Come Back to Me” like Radiohead, “Universal Gleam” uncannily like nemeses Blur’s “Tender”—an identity crisis if ever there was one. Aside from “Wall of Glass,” As You Were never convinces you of its reason to exist, and there’s little more purpose to be found in the lyrics.

Searching for clarity in a Liam Gallagher lyric is like looking for artistic depth in a coloring book, but a brief summary anyway: Everyone who’s ever let him down had better watch it, because they’re gonna get their just desserts, but when he apologizes, you best believe God is on his side. “In my defense all my intentions were good/And heaven holds a place somewhere for the misunderstood,” he shrugs on “For What It’s Worth.” Fine—imagine how pointless a humble Gallagher album would be. If he’s writing in his typical classic rock madlibs (“Angels, gimme shelter/‘Cause I’m about to fall/It’s all gone helter-skelter,” he swaggers on “You Better Run”), then his co-writers are having fun reassembling his greatest tropes as Gallagher fridge poetry.

It’s probably no coincidence that As You Were’s silliest song is also an unmitigated highlight. “Chinatown” was written entirely by Andrew Wyatt and Michael Tighe, who have an uncanny ear for Gallagher’s surrealist worldview. “Well the cops are taking over/While everyone’s in yoga/‘Cause happiness is still a warm gun,” rock’s best anorak-wearer drawls over a steady beat and soft finger-picked guitar. “What’s it to be free, man? What’s a European? Me, I just believe in the sun.” Fortunately, there’s little time to contemplate Gallagher’s searching inquiry into Britain’s post-Brexit identity as a huge, beautiful, meaningless chorus comes to blow it all away, just as it should.

After some impressively boilerplate material, the last few songs offer a tiny bit of insight into Gallagher’s sense of purpose on an unmemorable album. On “Come Back to Me,” he could be pulling himself back from the brink. The laconic “Universal Gleam” feels like his promise to keep on playing this role for fans, a middle-aged “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” about his ability to galvanize and reflect unheard lives (“I’ll help you fix your broken dreams/I’ll give you something you can shout about/I won’t ever let you down”). And although the gooey “I’ve All I Need” apparently takes its lyrics from inspirational quote montages (“Tomorrow never knows/The winds of change must blow”), as a tribute to his girlfriend’s unwavering support, it’s unusually vulnerable. As You Were isn’t, as Gallagher billed it last year, “chin-out” music. It’s more chin-up, a faltering effort from an artist whose voice continues to drown out his music.

Liam Gallagher As You Were (2017)

From theguardian.com

The relative commercial failure of Liam Gallagher’s post-Oasis band Beady Eye counts as one of the more perplexing events in recent pop history. To an impartial observer, their two albums seemed neither better nor worse than Oasis’s multi-platinum latter-day efforts. It was surprising that a fanbase who once seemed perhaps the most devoted and undiscriminating around – people who dutifully trooped out in their millions to buy albums as mediocre as Heathen Chemistry, people who sent a track as slender as Songbird to the upper reaches of the singles chart – suddenly became so capricious, so seemingly discerning in their pursuit of Beatles/Slade-influenced bloke-rock. But they deserted in their droves: comparing Beady Eye’s sales figures to those of even the least successful Oasis album, 90% of them jumped ship. Why? Was it loyalty to Noel? Or does some kind of super-sense lurk beneath their feather-cuts that enables them to discern a qualitative difference between the contents of the Beady Eye album Different Gear, Still Speeding and all the forgettable old toot Oasis peddled in the noughties?

Whatever the reason, it has left the younger Gallagher in a strange position: working, at his new record label’s behest, with pop songwriters for hire – most notably Greg Kurstin, of Adele, Sia and Ellie Goulding fame – and openly referring to his debut solo album as “my last chance”. If the pro songwriters occasionally just turn out machine-tooled takes on the aforementioned old toot that became Oasis’s main commodity in their later years, elsewhere the decision to employ them pays dividends in punchy, sharp production touches – the sampled guitar screech that powers the great single Wall of Glass; ominous We Love You-esque piano at the end of Come Back to Me – and some dexterous melodic twists and turns. An otherwise nondescript two-chord trudge called I Get By is unexpectedly rescued by a middle eight that achieves a dizzying vertical take-off.

For What It’s Worth and Paper Crown, meanwhile, are fantastic: conspicuously better ballads than Gallagher Snr has come up with in 20 years, although it’s perhaps worth noting that their degree of craftsman’s polish means they don’t recall Oasis so much as the stadium air-punchers Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams wrote under Oasis’s influence. Chinatown is based around a lovely acoustic guitar figure, but is hobbled by lyrics so awful they can only be listened to safely with a pillow in front of you, thus avoiding injury when the urge to beat your head against the table becomes overwhelming. It sounds like a parody of one of those portentous Noel’s-been-having-a-think ballads that stank up Oasis’s late albums, and furthermore seems to favour us with Liam’s indispensable thoughts on Brexit: “What’s it to be free, man? What’s a European? Me, I just believe in the sun.”

In truth, the lyrics are a problem throughout – although in fairness, at this stage, anyone buying an Oasis-related product in the hope of hearing decent lyrics is optimistic to the point of insanity. At their best, they aim for Shaun Ryder-y gibberish and occasionally hit their target – “You would keep the secrets in yer / You’ve been keeping paraphernalia” – or throw out put-downs that sometimes stick: “You made fun of everyone that falls, but in the meantime they were saving you a place.” At their worst, they persist in the wearying old habit of cramming clunking Beatles references in at every conceivable turn – “Happiness is still a warm gun”, “Look for the girl” – which rather serves to underline that there’s nothing new here, nothing to suggest that there has been any broadening of Gallagher’s musical horizons in the last 25 years.

This is an album on which a track that sounds like the Hollies rather than the usual gallery of 60s and 70s suspects counts as a bold step into the unknown. You listen to him on the concluding I’ve All I Need, singing “Slow down, all things must pass, take your time, know the score, tomorrow never knows” and think: never mind the rest of us mate, are you not getting a bit bored of this stuff by now?

In fact, I’ve All I Need – written by Gallagher alone – has a certain elegiac quality, as if its author assumes it’s going to be the last his audience hear of him for the foreseeable: “Dry your eyes … thanks for your support.” That seems a bit premature: if As You Were is not an unalloyed triumph, then nor is it the stuff of career-ending disaster. Its failings are the failings you could level at pretty much every Oasis album, its sprinkling of highlights an improvement on most of their output since the mid-90s. Perhaps that’s enough to win back the fans who jumped ship.