Noel Gallagher – This Is the Place Review

Noel Gallagher’s half-hearted efforts through his solo career should be no surprise. He made up half of an overrated band and is now half the artist he used to be after a split from brother Liam. This Is the Place proves as much, an EP nobody ever got around to listening. He admitted it himself when he took to the Glastonbury stage before Paul McCartney, playing songs nobody bothered to check out. There may be good reason for that. One of the five EPs released between 2019 and 2022, Gallagher hoped to reinvent a dead form of release. There is plenty life in it now, though. Ironically had Gallagher waited just a short while for the likes of Geese and Kurt Vile to start exploring the opportunities the extended play offered, he would be right up there with them. Not in quality, but in name.  

Start strong with This Is The Place then, a shimmering and space-age-styled piece which has an exceptional bass funk to it and a solid Gallagher at the heart of it. Nice vocal performances do not outweigh the emptiness of the lyrics though. This may be one of Gallagher’s better, forgotten-about tracks, though it does linger close to the sentiment found on This Must Be The Place from Talking Heads. Burying his vocals underneath a bed of laser beam sound effects may be the right move, though the additional interjections from backing vocalists and the slight echoes to Gallagher’s vocal performance here are quite sweet. This Is the Place comes across as a well-layered and heartfelt piece, though this consistency dies off soon enough and does irreversible damage to the EP.  

Remix editions died out in the mid-1990s when Pulp started getting Vocoder to massacre their singles. Why Gallagher is desperate to reach out to The Reflex and Dense & Pika to rework his already abysmal offerings here is fascinating, but irrelevant. Gallagher here is toying with genres and never finds a consistent place. This is the place to lose a sense of consistency for the sake of vibrancy and experimentation. Impressive and assuring it may be to hear Gallagher is still open to exploring new styles, it is not something which managed to explode or escape this EP run. Heavy, heavy percussion on A Dream Is All I Need To Get By is not enough to expand beyond the light and floaty experience from these lacklustre lyrics.  

All in all, not the worst experience, for Gallagher that is. His experimental swing toward neo-psychedelia served him well on Who Built the Moon? though it seems fear of audience reprimand has pushed him far away from it once more. Council Skies, the flatlining offering from this year, is not a lick better than This Is the Place. More heart in three originals, two remixes and only one of which has real interest or heart to it, than there was in the working-class cosplay fashioned up by his latest release. Evil Flower offers nothing the preceding two tracks already did, and those remixes, well, the less said about those six-minute blunders the better. This Is the Place is certainly not the place to be for consistency or quality, but Gallagher is still keen to throw himself into projects of unique style and variety – something he did not do with Oasis, nor the works which follow this EP series.