Chasing Yesterday – Warmer mid-tempo, Johnny Marr on guitar

Johnny Marr on the warmer songs

On Chasing Yesterday, Noel Gallagher steps away from the Oasis story. A saxophone sits in the arrangement. Many of the songs move at a medium pace, with choruses big enough for a crowd. Released on 2 March 2015 via Sour Mash, the second Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album is the first he produced himself. The sound is warmer, and less aggressive than the old band. Johnny Marr plays on “Ballad of the Mighty I”. A saxophone runs through “Riverman”. The choruses stay large without the old Britpop attack.

“In the Heat of the Moment” opens brighter, with more space. “Riverman” moves slowly, closer to Pink Floyd and to Burt Bacharach, and the horn finishes the lines. “The Girl with X-Ray Eyes” and “While the Song Remains the Same” fill the middle of the record. Gallagher still likes titles that sound like film posters. The Deluxe Version adds tracks around the same core: songs that take their time, arrangements with air between the chords, a voice set inside the mix rather than pushed in front of it.

Read on its own, the title sounds nostalgic. Inside the lyric, it tells you to move on. Gallagher was writing all the time. He arrived with a stack of finished songs and let the studio decide which ones belonged here. The album reached the top of the UK chart, and the festival dates followed. The chart story is public. The studio story is a songwriter trusting the songs he had, rather than the old volume.