With Blur about to release a new album and Pulp’s return taking the form of a bustling summer gig schedule, all we need to make 2023 the return of the Britpop Big Three is an Oasis reunion. Alas, with Liam and Noel still scrapping, lately via the mediums of talkSPORT and Twitter, it looks like the closest we’ll get is another High Flying Birds record. Which is, admittedly, quite far. If the Gallaghers did miraculously patch things up at short notice, Noel’s solo project already has the perfect comeback track: Easy Now, the centrepiece of the outfit’s fourth album, is a vintage patchwork of lump-in-throat melodies, sleazy riffs, sentimental lyrics and a big galumphing chorus just begging to be bellowed into the cold black night.
The rest of Council Skies – a title Noel nicked from a book by his mate, the artist Pete McKee – is less moreishly nostalgic. The title track is a tinny, chugging slice of 00s indie that seems to go out of its way to produce as generic lyrics as possible (“Cause life is unpredictable / You can win or lose it all”) and although there are a few nods to the bright psychedelia and good-time glam of the band’s previous album, Who Built the Moon?, there is also much greying meat-and-two-veg guitar pop, which occasionally veers into old-man gentleness (see: the actually rather Blur-ish Dead to the World). Despite a handful of the elder Gallagher’s irresistible everyman anthems, much of Council Skies is unambitious and generic to the point of tedium.