Johnny Marr on the warmer songs
On Chasing Yesterday, Noel Gallagher walks out of Oasis mythology with a saxophone in the doorway and a mid-tempo patience that still feels like a terrace chant. Released on 2 March 2015 via Sour Mash, the second Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album is the first he produced himself: less barricade, more late-afternoon glow. Johnny Marr leans into “Ballad of the Mighty I”; a saxophone unspools through “Riverman”; the choruses keep their altitude without needing a Britpop battering ram.
“In the Heat of the Moment” opens like a curtain pulled back on daylight. “Riverman” drifts toward Pink Floyd haze and Burt Bacharach courtesy, then lets the horn finish the sentence. “The Girl with X-Ray Eyes” and “While the Song Remains the Same” thicken the middle of the record with that Gallagher gift for titles that sound like film posters. The Deluxe Version adds space around the same spine: songs that refuse to hurry, arrangements that leave air between the chords, a voice that has learned how to sit inside a mix instead of punching through it.
What makes the album stick is the contradiction in the title. Out of context it smells of nostalgia; inside the lyric it is an order to move on. Gallagher wrote constantly, arrived with a stack of finished songs, and let the studio decide which ones belonged to this weather. UK chart summit, festival stages waiting: the commerce followed, but the private story is a songwriter trusting instinct over the old noise.
If you take the title out of context, it does seem nostalgic, but it comes from a lyric. The line is, “Let’s stop chasing yesterday.” That’s the opposite of being nostalgic.
(Noel Gallagher, Rock Cellar Magazine / TIDAL interview, 2015)
Play Chasing Yesterday again and the hangover title story fades; what remains is craft under soft light. Marr’s guitar, Noel’s melodies, a band that prefers mid-tempo to Britpop sprint. The High Flying Birds project stopped looking back at Oasis line-ups and kept the hooks. That trade is the album’s actual argument.
