ALBUM REVIEWS
Pacino and DeNiro, Nicki and Beyoncé… Tinchy Stryder and the Chuckle Brothers? Look, the point is that pop culture is packed with long-awaited team-ups, clashes of titans that sometimes soar with ineffable magic and sometimes crash-land on the same cultural scrapheap as Metallica and Lou Reed’s ‘Lulu’. Just because someone’s great in their own right, it doesn’t necessarily mean their talents will mesh with those of another creative giant.
Liam Gallagher and John Squire, though, have spent decades courting one another like One Day’s Emma and Dexter. Liam’s never been shy about his adoration of The Stone Roses – in fact, Oasis’ mission was essentially to finish what the earlier Manchester band, with one classic album and an underwhelming follow-up to their name, started in the late ‘80s. When the Gallaghers invited former Roses guitarist Squire to perform ‘Champagne Supernova’ at their epochal Knebworth show in 1996, they were all but getting on their hands and knees to declare: “We are not worthy.”
Yet it’s taken some 30 years for ‘Liam Gallagher John Squire’, which is more imaginative than its title might suggest, to come to fruition. Although he’s been more focused on creating visual art in recent years, the guitarist’s genius remains undimmed, as he adorns these bluesy arrangements with slow-burning grooves and wailing licks that ache with his life-long love of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. This is psychedelic, on occasion even transcendent music brought down to earth by Liam’s gravelly sneer, an intoxicating mix that often comes good on the singer’s promise that they’ve combined “the best bits of Oasis with the best bits of the Stone Roses”. You think: why didn’t they do this before?
The duo have collaborated once previously – on 1997’s ‘Love Me and Leave Me’, a keening track released by Squire’s short-lived post-Roses band The Seahorses – but this new project didn’t come to life until Gallagher returned to Knebworth as a solo star (he scoffs at the word ‘artist’) in 2022. Just to ram home how successful his comeback has been, and the extent to which it’s placed him back in the midst of former glories, Liam had the guitarist perform ‘Champagne Supernova’ again. During rehearsals, Squire revealed he’d written a couple of new tunes: would Liam like to sing on them? The answer was – presumably swearily – in the affirmative, and the project spiralled from there.
If they haven’t exactly walked their tasselled moccasins into a bold new direction, the result is a thoroughly modern record that meshes Squire’s gritty guitar work, which revels in imperfection, with the studio sheen of Liam’s solo albums. As their courtship blossomed, the musicians exchanged photos and video clips for a moodboard that set the tone of the album: Liam sent Bob Marley and the Pistols; Squire sent Hendrix, the Faces and the Humble Pie track ‘30 Days in the Hole’. The resulting 10 Squire-penned tunes were demoed in the guitarist’s home near Macclesfield, before they decamped to LA to record them with uber-producer Greg Kurstin, who helmed Liam’s three solo albums.
Squire, the auteur, was nervous about such a move – but it’s proved a canny one. What could have been a spit-and-sawdust psych-blues record is instead augmented with a glam crunch (the woozily assured ‘I’m A Wheel’); warm, rolling keys (joyous second single ‘Mars to Liverpool’); and buzzing electronic accoutrements (self-explanatory opener ‘Raise Your Hands’). The Roses-meets-Oasis promise heaves most gloriously into view on ‘Love You Forever’, as Liam’s loved-up delivery gives way to a thrillingly indulgent guitar breakdown. By the time Squire’s lashes of guitar weave around stabs of boogie-woogie piano on ‘You’re Not the Only One’, you’ll be digging out your tie-dye.
Sonically, the tracks are admittedly of a piece, though that’s sort of the point. Squire, who’s previously withheld his musical output like Scrooge McDuck hoarding riches in his bank vault, teems with ideas, overlapping gorgeous melodies with howling solos. Having overcome a near-catastrophic hand injury and the collapse of the Roses comeback, the guitarist sounds absolutely invigorated – and uses that inspiration to paint on one large canvas, rather than craft individual portraits. His lyrics are perhaps more questionable, but Liam isn’t exactly inexperienced at transforming even the most pedestrian rhymes into terrace-ready chants. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” Obi-Wan Gallagher shrugs on ‘I’m A Wheel’. No-one else could get away with it.
If fans were vaguely alarmed by lead single ‘Just Another Rainbow’, which pulses with a reassuringly Roses-style riff but also sees Liam recite the colours of the rainbow and ponder, “am I your windmill?”, it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by the album itself. Obviously this isn’t a ‘Definitely Maybe’ or ‘The Stone Roses’ – no-one could touch those hook-laden masterpieces. As a triumph of style and mood, though, ‘Liam Gallagher John Squire’ is well worthy of their enduring legacies.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Listening to Karin Ann’s debut album ‘Through the Telescope’, you’d be forgiven for not realising that the Slovakian singer-songwriter is just 21-years-old. There is a knowing darkness to this music, which brims with observations earned through experience and the mystique of an author with many stories to tell.
“All his skin eaten by worms / Nothing left there / A pile of bones”, Ann sings on ‘Pile of Bones’. For all its macabre imagery – a through line across the album’s 14 tracks – the song is delivered like a fairytale, with Ann’s soft, ethereal vocals floating like wisps of smoke around its beating heart.
Her singing voice is light, calling to mind the ease and indie droll of Faye Webster and Frankie Cosmos. It all feeds into the album’s curious mix of light and dark, as Ann sings through honeyed whispers of deep emotional strife, from losing faith to leaving childhood behind too early, embedding these dark secrets in twinkling melodies and delicate guitar strings. “The band keeps playing while I continue to cry”, she sings softly on dollhouse-like track ‘The Band Keeps Playing’. “Maybe they won’t see that my dress keeps tearing / And it’s swallowing me”.
Ann’s songwriting is at its strongest when it goes for specifics. There’s queer love song ‘Olivia’, ‘A Song for the Moon’ – a love letter to the darker sides of herself – or ‘My Best Work of Art’, the album’s lovely closer that chronicles Ann’s reclamation of her own identity through the lens of painting and brushstrokes.
After a tough few years fighting illness and cutting her teeth in music, Ann delivers a confident and unflinching debut album. ‘Through The Telescope’ weaves her personal struggles into beautiful, potent songwriting, which she gives space to breathe amidst lush vocals and rich, but never overblown instrumentation. Dancing deftly across folk, rock, country and pop, and spanning emotional landscapes from lovestruck to melancholy, this is a most precocious debut.
