As a compilation title,
Back the Way We Came
is so clever it's a wonder it's never been used before. It's also a title that fits
Noel Gallagher
, who has specialized in finding the unexpected within the familiar. He sharpened these skills as the leader of
Oasis
and carried them over into his
High Flying Birds
, the group of pros he assembled after he got fed up dealing with the amateurish antics of his brother
Liam
.
arrived upon the tenth anniversary of the first album from
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
and, as a record, it has a surprisingly cohesive narrative. The first disc contains songs from the first two
HFB
albums, records
Noel
made when he was determined to be tasteful and controlled in a way
never was. The second opens with "Black Star Dancing," a non-LP disco single from 2019 that announces how
Gallagher
wound up making brighter, vibrant music after he got his muso ambitions out of his system. It's an interesting trajectory -- and one that bodes well for his next decade -- and it makes for a more absorbing listen than nearly all of the
albums, its consistency due in part to how the second disc collects all his non-LP angles from the back half of the 2010s, a move that also is decidedly consumer-friendly. (If that wasn't enough to hook fans, there's an edition of
with a third disc containing instrumentals, remixes, demos, and acoustic versions of the core
catalog, odds, and ends that are surprisingly satisfying when gathered together.) ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine