Liam Gallagher – ‘Why Me? Why Not.’ review: a stellar sequel that adds depth of character (2019)

From nme.com

A classic sequel that adds depth of character, this follow-up to Liam’s Platinum-selling debut is best when he’s introspective. And wait ‘til Noel hears the “cosmic pop”

Early last year, Liam Gallagher promised NME that his second solo album would be “a bit more in-your-face” than ‘As You Were’, the Platinum-shifting game-changer that reignited his career. It would be “less apologetic”, he said, adding: “I’d love to do a proper out-and-out punk rock album – a bit Pistols, a bit Stooges.” Well, ‘Why Me? Why Not.’ only half-delivers on that promise, though it’s a certainly a worthy victory lap for his lauded comeback.

He’s once again teamed up with his “army of songwriters”, as Noel Gallagher witheringly referred to the co-writers who’ve helped to channel Liam’s Britpop swagger into a glossy 21st century pop-rock template. Super-producer Greg Kurstin and top songwriters Andrew Wyatt and Michael Tighe have returned, while LA indie rocker Damon McMahon also came on board for a couple of tracks. Liam co-wrote every song on this record (he was absent from the songwriting credits on two songs from the predecessor) and it’s a more distinctive and memorable album.

With anybody else you might suggest this implies increased confidence – but how much more self-assured can Liam Gallagher get? Curiously, though, instead of excelling as a Stooges-inspired rocker, ‘Why Me? Why Not.’ truly soars at its most introspective and laidback.

‘One Of Us’, the bruised ballad on which Liam implores an estranged loved one (who could this be about, we wonder?) to “open your door” and remember “you were always one of us”, is in many ways a Gallagher-by-numbers, a sing-song chorus and rollicking acoustic guitar amounting to a track that brings to mind ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’, a latter-day Oasis highlight (a rare thing) from 2002’s ‘Heathen Chemistry’. At the three-minute mark, though, the song slips into a pretty coda of undulating strings and a gospel choir lamenting, “It’s a shame / We thought you’d change”. It’s richer than anything on ‘As You Were’.

‘Once’ is similarly affecting, as this middle-aged rock star misses the good old days and wonders when he was freer, running wild in Burnage as a child or watching the royalties stack up: “It was easier to have fun back when we had nothin’… Back when we were damaged.” And ‘Alright Now’ offsets warm, analogue tones – rolling piano and a laconic bassline – and a spacey, Marc Bolan-style guitar solo, with Liam confessing, “at times I wonder if you’re listening”.

It doesn’t matter if these tender songs are about his older brother: they work because they’re the sound of a notorious big mouth reflecting on a life lived at full speed, as he counts his regrets but refuses to be bowed by them. Like the ‘As You Were’ standout ‘For What It’s Worth’, they capture the contradiction at the heart of Liam Gallagher: acute emotional intelligence meets chin-out bolshiness. It’s always compelling when he reveals this softer side of his psyche. His rivalry with Noel’s become increasingly toxic – their children and other family members have been dragged in – and the air of contrition plays well.

Perhaps that’s why the more “in-your-face” numbers can sometimes feel a little more laboured. It’s interesting that ‘Shockwave’ packs a glam stomp, but Noel-baiting lyrics such as “you’re a snake / you’re a weasel” sound petty rather than revealing in the aforementioned context. Meanwhile, the pulsing ‘The River’ feels duty bound to fans’ expectations instead of genuinely vehement (it’s hard to imagine Liam Gallagher being particularly worried about “the money sucking MPs”). Soppy pop-rock song ‘Now That I’ve Found You’ sounds like the theme tune to a ‘90s sitcom, his very own ‘All For One’, The Stone Roses’ polarising 2015 comeback track.

The rougher stuff works better when it’s imbued with the wooziness of those reflective tracks. ‘Gone’ combines a lithe, Ennio Morricone guitar line with a hushed spoken-word section where, improbably, he sounds a little like Jarvis Cocker. Better still is ‘Halo’, which picks up where the Beady Eye (they weren’t as bad as everybody said!) track ‘Bring The Light’ left off. It’s always fun when Liam does his Jerry Lee Lewis thing, and here he combines rinky-dink piano with a recorder solo.Volume 0%01:0100:1836:25More Videos11:01Greta Van Fleet interview: “we’re working on something quite different for album two”01:30Liam Gallagher: “I’ve always thought I was godlike” | VO5 NME Awards 201801:56NME Awards 2007 – Godlike Genius – The Clash04:08Liam Gallagher plays ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ live | VO5 NME Awards 201804:43Liam Gallagher on life.04:59Liam Gallagher plays ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” | VO5 NME Awards 201801:02Liam Gallagher wins the Godlike Genius Award | VO5 NME Awards 201801:02The Simpsons: 10 greatest characters to have only appeared in one episode02:23PlayStation partners with Discord to bring the service to consoles next year00:38Slipknot win Best Band In The World at NME Awards 2020Close 

This album lacks the novelty factor – Liam finally going solo – that made ‘As You Were’ so welcome. But it’s more diverse (everything’s relative) and textured. At times, as on the trippy, psychedelic breakdown that precedes the final reprise of ‘Once’, it drifts deliciously close to “cosmic pop”, the phrase Liam has used to slag off his brother’s more experimental solo stuff (imagine Noel listening to this).

On ‘Meadow’, which has the studied Beatle-isms of a Julian Lennon song, Liam insists, “You’ve got to hold your head up high / If You want to break the chains from your past life”. He’d perhaps do well to take his own advice and give the Noel-baiting stuff a break, but this is a cracking sequel nonetheless.

Liam Gallagher: Why Me Why Not review – Cheap but potent (2019)

From irishtimes.com

Two years ago, Liam Gallagher’s debut solo album, As You Were, proved that the former Oasis (and, lest we forget, Beady Eye) singer could at least instil some measure of energy into songs that were as cookie-cutter as they come. It is little surprise, then, that the follow-up album doesn’t so much deviate as hammer home not only the sheer force of Gallagher’s encoded rock’n’roll voice as a valuable instrument but also (and here, of course, we are obliged to quote Noël Coward) “how potent cheap music is”. 

So, no, there are no FKA Twigs feints here, Blood Orange tricks there or Bon Iver ruses in between. What we have instead is, pretty much, what you would expect, albeit more streamlined and – following the debut’s commercial success, which dragged him out of Beady Eye’s downfall and into a space where he took on his older sibling, Noel, and surpassed him in the charts – more assured, and not too surprisingly, more reflectively middle-aged. 

Just because we know what’s to come, however, doesn’t necessarily make the music any less enjoyable. All of the songs here are co-written with Andrew Wyatt, Michael Tighe, Greg Kurstin (all of whom reinforced Gallagher’s debut with a wealth of songwriting expertise) and another American songwriter, Damon McMahon. While cynics may ponder exactly how much of a contribution Gallagher actually makes to his solo work (big brother Noel has dismissively mentioned that Liam’s mates comprise an “army of songwriters”), the results are often so good that such thinking becomes a waste of time. 

Liam Gallagher: cynics may ponder exactly how much of a contribution he actually makes to his solo work

The album begins as it means to go on: borrowing from the great and not-so as a means to an end. Flagrantly grabbing the guitar intro from U2’s Desire, opening track Shockwave subsequently drifts into a sub-Oasis stomp. It’s a kicker of a tune, and there’s more to come.

One of Us refers to the Oasis split in 2009 (the video for this song is much less ambiguous about this), while the acoustic strum of Once is a veritable nostalgia fest in its continuation of the Beatles/Oasis mash-up. Indeed, quite shamelessly, Once doesn’t stop there: it so efficiently conjures up the spirits of at least three John Lennon songs that Apple Corps should start looking for royalties.

And yet our friend Noël Coward was right: the phones-aloft chorus of “I remember how you used to shine back then, you went down so easy like a glass of wine, my friend. When the dawn came up you felt so inspired to do it again, but it turned out you only get to do it once” is delivered so reverently in memory of dear, departed friends that its blatant familiarity fails to spoil it. 

Other songs such as The River (a lost Oasis classic, if that kind of thing takes your fancy), Meadow (a splendid power-pop merger of Strawberry Fields Forever psychedelia and George Harrison-style guitar solos) and Halo (it’s as if Mott the Hoople never split up, and there’s a T Rex mention for good measure) ensure reference points never stray too far from your mind, but the glint and polish of the tunes are never too far from the surface, either. 

Look – you know what to expect, so let’s be having none of your whining. Liam Gallagher, for all his flaws, can hold a tune, and Why Me Why Not is full of them. If you can accept that, without prejudice – and the realisation that there isn’t a crumb of originality here – then you’ll be humming them from now to next summer. Carry on.

Liam Gallagher Why Me? Why Not? (2019)

From pitchfork.com

The former Oasis frontman’s second solo album is pitched as a reintroduction, but forward motion—whether musical or personal—remains foreign to him.

There’s a moment on “Halo,” the fifth song on Liam Gallagher’s Why Me? Why Not., where the rocker breaks down and a flute comes to the forefront in a flourish of purple psychedelia. At that precise moment, it’s hard not to think of “Halo” as a sideways dig at “Holy Mountain,” the pounding, flute-filled first single from Noel Gallagher’s 2017 album, Who Built the Moon? Then again, it’s generally hard to think of Liam Gallagher without thinking of his estranged sibling. More than being just brothers, the pair have historically had complementary strengths, with Noel providing Oasis their songs and Liam giving the band its voice and charisma.

Noel managed to shake off the ghost of Oasis, but that task has proven much harder for Liam to achieve. Why Me? Why Not. is Liam’s second solo album, arriving after a pair of albums by Beady Eye, a group that was effectively latter-day Oasis without Noel. Considering that Noel was the chief songwriter in Oasis, this was a problem. It’s not that Liam didn’t write. He began contributing to Oasis albums in 2000, once rock’n’roll excess and sibling stress started to take a toll on Noel, and Liam continued to contribute a few tunes every few years, always maintaining a respectable level of craft without ever threatening to approach his brother’s level of mastery.

Beady Eye eroded Gallagher’s sales but not his fame. Tabloids continued to pursue Liam not only because he was mired in personal troubles, but because he made good copy. Tales of divorce and illegitimate children kept him in the spotlight as he made the slow transition from lead singer to lone wolf. When he reintroduced himself as a solo singer in 2017 with As You Were, the move made sense, since he needed to draw a clear line between himself, Beady Eye, and Oasis. What is a mystery is why he’s chosen to replicate this same maneuver for Why Me? Why Not.

Accompanied by a documentary film that attempts to justify Gallagher’s wanderings in the aftermath of Oasis—a movie that quickly devolves into an extended press kit, where the moments of high drama involve a late-night Twitter meltdown where friends plead, “Put the phone down”—Why Me? Why Not. scans as a re-introduction, right down to its title. That’s hardly necessary, in part because Liam has spent half of his life as one of the most documented humans on Earth, but also because musical forward motion is a foreign concept to him. Ever since Oasis conquered the world in 1995, he’s settled for singing psychedelic pop tunes, earnest ballads, and glam-rock stompers, a combination that also fuels Why Me? Why Not.

The sound may remain the same but the vibe does not. Oasis were young men dreaming of escape, but Liam Gallagher is a middle-aged man who is happy to be here now; there is no hunger here, no yearning, just classy contentment. Familiarity is a tonic. Now, when Liam nods to the Beatles—“Once” opens with a melodic line reminiscent of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” “Meadow” has a slide guitar straight out of George Harrison—it’s not a matter of arrogance: The fleeting Fab Four allusions are intended as a secret bond between Gallagher and fans. Similarly, nothing on the album sounds exactly like Oasis—it’s all too controlled and studio-sculpted—but not a song here would’ve been imaginable without the Gallaghers’ enthusiastic embrace of classic rock tropes. “The River” rambles along to crunching chords and swirling organs; “One of Us” indulges in a bit of nostalgic mid-tempo melancholy; “Gone” achieves a bit of cinematic grandeur with its spaghetti Western orchestration.

Oasis never attempted to paint with such a colorful palette, and the increased level of professional craft is surely due to the presence of Greg Kurstin and Andrew Wyatt, producers and songwriters who also worked on As You Were. Kurstin and Wyatt were enlisted as collaborators because Gallagher recognized the limitations of his songwriting; he has no shame in this—it’s one of the plot points in the documentary. This pair, along with a handful of other behind-the-scenes musicians, help turn Liam’s ideas into songs, honing their hooks so they snag quickly and painlessly, polishing the production so it gleams like a wall of mirrors. Every trick in the book is here: sawing strings, fuzzy guitars, stacks of harmonies, all with sequenced rhythms that gently push Gallagher right into the mainstream of modern music circa 2009. Maybe it’s not exactly modern, but it’s closer than Gallagher has been in the past.

The team of producers on Why Me? Why Not. helps refine Gallagher’s sonic signatures, but it also pushes him into adult-alternative territory. Which means that Liam, the last great rock singer of the 20th century, is now a pop vocalist. Age has softened his rasp, a change he modulates by singing with precision, not abandon. It can be pleasurable to hear him sing with such restraint—he’s turning into a nuanced ballad singer, as evidenced by the sepia-toned “Once”—but the shift underscores how his musical and emotional range is restrained by his adherence to the past. This fundamental musical conservatism still has its charms, but as he gets older, it’s beginning to be overwhelmed by nostalgia. Where Liam Gallagher once yearned for years he never experienced, he’s now pining for his glory days, a shift that gives his purportedly friendly music an accidentally pensive undercurrent. Despite the shiny, bright surfaces, what’s left unspoken is that Liam is not quite ready to admit that he’s already had the time of his life and is not quite sure what to do next.