It’s one thing to scatter new seeds, another thing completely to cultivate the land. With the tragic loss of Tom Petty, rock ‘n’ roll lost one its most important guardians. Thank God we still have Liam Gallagher.

From Wall Of Glass down to For What It’s Worth, we have a settling of scores, an uncompromising simplicity of purpose.

Wall Of Glass is a wailing, unapologetic explosion of masculine power. The song presents the chief emotion of the album. That being: ‘I’m at the top of my game, and more’s the pity for you.’

Many of the songs to follow have an enemy in their sights, and at all times it seems that enemy is an incarnation of the modern disease, the distracted, careerist, Blairite spreadsheet monkeys, with their green tea and hot yoga.

The thudding opening chords of Bold are refreshingly simple, carrying the opening line into a quiet euphoria. ‘Gonna take you off my list of to-dos…’ This is a mature and calm manifesto of the rebellious spirit. I ain’t dead yet.

Greedy Soul needs to be played live. Nevertheless, it’s an exhilarating rise in temperature, while maintaining the emotional voice of Bold.

Paper Crown is a child-like metaphor, but as the song progresses it becomes a deeper and more powerful image. What kind of paper is the crown made of? I can’t help thinking it’s yesterday’s newspaper, bringing you the hard truth you can’t bear to see.

Of course there are shades here of Dylan’s Queen Jane Approximately – where’s all your power now your beauty has faded? But it’s worse than that. It’s the vinegar-soaked paper of an old chip packet, the mistakes of the past that can’t be origami’d into something new.

The bridge is a direct lift from Lennon’s Jealous Guy, but adds a slight operatic and dreamy quality to an otherwise straight-shooting Ashcroft-eque indie ballad. My favourite line is: ‘The hounds of hell won’t lie down on the ashes of your Paper Crown’.

Musically, a change of gear occurs with Come Back To Me and Doesn’t Have To Be That Way. The first of these is a jumpy, britpop stadium anthem. In its heart it’s a seduction song in the vein of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. This track has one of the few outright rock solos on it, but nothing proggy or masturbatory. The Gallagher tone is never compromised, and the piano driven coda adds a swaggering, Happy Mondays feel to the fade out.

Doesn’t Have To Be That Way has some surprising shades of Human League and eighties Bowie, with a powerful opening homage to Hacienda techno. This song is new territory for Gallagher, but you can tell he is having fun, stretching his vocals and allowing the snarl of his voice to ride a different kind of beat.

This song has the quality of many radio tunes of the nineties, songs that Oasis would have given a wide berth. The guitar solo is very Doorsy, a searing slide psychedelia adding a vintage seasoning to what is really a dance-floor pop track.

For all its ‘back-to-basics’ qualities, this is a fresh and creative album that doesn’t rest on cliches and ‘the right way’ to write a song. There is a stridency, and that, more than any other factor, is what Gallagher brings to the table.

Some musos will object to Gallagher’s branding of modern music as boring and ‘beige’, but he’s not saying there’s no talent, or that people don’t rock out. He’s pointing to the fact that what passes for a ‘good song’ these days is technical accomplishment, rather than a desire to drive home a point.

Go to any open mic in London, and you are likely to find many great writers and musicians, content only to sing to their own navels. The lyrics are merely brushstrokes in self-contained little masterpieces. Nothing grabs you by the throat.

The missing link in modern music is not the talent, not technique, not the ingenuity of the songs. It’s an attitude, a point-of-view, a desire to wrestle with the perceptions of the audience, to carve experience down to potent bullets of common human understanding.

Gallagher makes no excuses for the fact that he is not re-inventing the wheel. The tendency towards demanding innovation for innovation’s sake has led to the conflation of ‘difference’ with ‘originality’.

Just doing something new and different doesn’t mean you are creating a shift in the culture. And doing something familiar doesn’t mean you are resorting to cliches either.

Anyone can be different. Being original requires being in the right place at the right time with the right tools.

Liam Gallagher’s album is an opportunity for rock ‘n’ roll to regroup.