“Here comes that feeling, here it comes again.” That is indeed the feeling you get listening to “Mars to Liverpool” by the Manchester superduo of former Oasis frontman LIam Gallagher and former Stone Roses guitarist John Squire. The swaying chorus is a mile high as Squire spits out swaggering riffs that pull you back to the height of Britpop. Let’s just get this out of the way: Liam Gallagher John Squire is the best thing either have done since the ’90s. That makes for good headline fodder but anyone who has followed their respective careers knows that’s not saying all that much. The drop in quality after Oasis’ fantastic first two albums was steep, and his post-Noel records (Beady Eye, two solo albums) have been, y’know, fine; The Stone Roses’ long-gestating 1994 sophomore album, Second Coming, was a great-sounding but mostly tuneless letdown and his bluesy late-’90s band The Seahorses was forgettable at best and, apart from two Stone Roses comeback singles in 2016, he hasn’t done much at all since.
Still! This album is good, full-stop, no qualifiers. Squire, who gets sole writing credit on every song here, still has some tunes in his back pocket, and there are flashes of their old brilliance not to mention that cocky Northern attitude. “Make it up as you go along, nobody knows any better than you / Thank you for your thoughts and prayers and fuck you too,” Liam sings on “Make it Up as You Go Along,” which they may have been doing. The best songs, unsurprisingly, are the ones that lean heaviest on melody and recall the Stone Roses’ heyday. “Mother Nature’s Song,” one of a few blatant nods to the Beatles on the album, absolutely soars. “The melodies are beautiful,” it goes, and it’s hard to disagree. “Mars to Liverpool” and “Just Another Rainbow,” the album’s first two singles, are also corkers, and “One Day at a Time” drops in just a little dark psychedelia into the mix, not to mention a little humor (“you should’ve fucked me when you had the chance”).
Unfortunately, Squire’s blues rock tendencies are still very present. The second half of “I Am the Resurrection,” which closed The Stone Roses’ debut, remains a thrill 35 years later, but does anyone need a plodding track like “I’m a Wheel” with its endless fretboard runs and lines like “I’m a wheel, keep turning / a fire, keep burning” in 2024? Same goes for “Love You Forever” which feels like something from a John Mayall wannabe from 1967. (“You’re Not the Only One” is the most successful of the overtly blues numbers here.) The good far outweighs the bad, though. Squire and Gallagher sound engaged, that riffage works when in support of big hooks, and Greg Kurstin’s production gives everything a nice dusting of grit. Liam Gallagher John Squire will no doubt please fans as they wait for the inevitable Oasis reunion, but if someone had pushed them a little harder this could’ve been great. To paraphrase another Roses song, is this what the world was waiting for? Not exactly, but it’ll do.
