I've said it time and again: being in a band isn't a natural state for human beings. Maybe we're pack animals (maybe not?), but pack animals collaborate to hunt, not make songs. Some creatives can collaborate well for years. Most cannot. Add drink and drugs and audience adoration and then the math of being in a band becomes unsolvable. So it is that we get Noel Gallagher and the High Flying Birds coming to House of Blues Saturday night and not Oasis, a band that had the added flammability of sibling rivalry with his brother Liam.

The Oasis mess makes perfect sense. A proper antagonistic band needs a bomb thrower. But if you have a bomb thrower, you also need a bomb squad, otherwise you torch your base. So Noel Gallagher became the bomb squad in the band for which he wrote the lion's share of the music and Liam sang it with a distinctive braying fieriness, while also brilliantly saying things that other people might regret.

Then weary, Noel quit like a bomb squad cop in a movie, something along the lines of an "I'm too old for this $#!+."

He's put out three albums since with the High Flying Birds, all three very agreeable rock 'n roll recordings where influences were stitched to his sleeve with up-front honesty and utmost musical historian enthusiasm. He's toured them to audiences that hang on all the words -- not just the Oasis songs he drops throughout a set. But the post-Oasis stuff too.

Noel Gallagher never reinvented any rock and roll wheel, but he certainly created a durable tire. Nobody would call the guy a poet, but he's able to mix words and melody in a distinctive way that can set a crowd to singing along like few other musicians I've seen in decades of doing this. The hoity toity shorthand for such a song is an "anthem." It sounds lofty, but his tunes fit the bill.

Take "Little By Little," a largely ignored Oasis song on a largely ignored Oasis album, "Heathen Chemistry" from 15 years ago.

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On this night based on fan response, you'd think Gallagher and the Birds were chirping their way through a Beatles classic. The song is as marvel of economic construction: a murmured verse and then the indicator that something is coming, three lines that set up the chorus: "You know I didn't mean what I just said/But my God woke up on the wrong side of his bed..." At this point, the gathered were coiled. "AND IT JUST DON'T MATTER NOW."

Even then, he STILL hadn't gotten to the chorus!

Then, finally, the chorus. "Little by little . . ."

The build, pause and release is the kind of thing that can't be taught. Some people pick it up and wield it masterfully. Others never do.

Call it a manipulative play on the crowd if you will. But they (we) were buying what he was selling.

I knew the Oasis cornerstone songs -- "Don't Look Back in Anger" and "Wonderwall" -- would prompt similar but grander responses. But this tune in its own way underscores Gallagher's gift for constructing music. Just to be clear, the songs from the three post-Oasis albums played well, too.

I've enjoyed more than my share of shows in which the mumbling artist stares at shoes for two hours. But Gallagher is cut from older cloth. He steps like a rooster into the strutting role of ringleader, and he's quite good at it. Some of the best songs on his records play less well live, like "River Man," a wonderful tune on record, but one where the energy waned in a crowd.

But "Dream On," a seven-year-old song from his first HFB album soared. The thing about Gallagher, he's up front about his writing. His second HFB record was titled "Chasing Yesterday," after all. So if you hear the Beatles, New Order, Nick Drake or, particularly, Paul Weller in the mix, it's because he knows what they did years ago works, and that's why he put their influences in there. He doesn't slay his gods, he sits with them and breaks bread. Or failing that, knocks back a few pints with them.

The result isn't a show that makes you think about the rotten state of the world. But it might make you forget about it for about two hours and just think about songs you know and songs you didn't know you knew.

And his band bears mention because it was proudly loud and large. I rolled my eyes at the four tour buses out front when I arrived at House of Blues. But Gallagher came with a core five-piece that was kind of antagonistic in and of itself, with the great Chris Sharrock on drums, who I've seen with World Party many times. But who also played on the La's ageless "There She Goes," and is one of the Birds swiped from Liam Gallagher's Beady Eye. The band also included old Oasis mate Gem Archer on guitar, another former Beady Eye guy.

At its grandest, the Birds numbered 12, Gallagher included, with brass, vocalists, the occasional flute, and such.

That's a lot of birds.

But all the instrumental fuss worked well. Some songs were leaner in presentation, others were grander. But at the center was a guy and a guitar, who really could've held the crowd with just some songs he'd written as a guy with a guitar. Which is an impressive thing: an elemental connection of sound, words and the way they strike a crowd of people drunk on those words and sounds and, well, whatever they consumed before the show.

Little by little. Until it becomes something not little at all.