The High Llamas
Retrospective, Rarities & Instrumentals

THE REVIEW

If you need your daily dose of brianwilsonesque keyboards and still long for (despite the clatter of cars down on the street) donaldfagenian voices over bacharachian melodies, if you are always waiting for a new song, a slender and stealthy combination of melody and beat that makes you turn your head toward the amplifier of the domestic sonorous diffusion contraption and open your mouth in some kind of spherical vowel (the "o" of amazement). If you too need to occasionally hum an irresistible melody, you cannot help but lend an ear to the High Llamas.

A dazzling project born in 1992 from the propulsive anxieties of Sean O'Hagan (guitarist and singer), a former member of the little-known Microdisney which fortunately dissolved at the end of the '80s and now involved in the projects of Stereolab, the High Llamas are almost the dream promotion of their founder. Melodic repetitions, unfolding of strings, electronic warbles, excursions of atypical instruments, retro merry-go-rounds. All in a sort of timeless blend.

In the double CD "Retrospective, Rarities & Instrumentals," songs and instrumental fragments from the first nine years of their career are showcased. In assembling the collection, Sean O'Hagan picked from tracks on the official CDs (from the debut album "Santa Barbara" in 1992 up to "Snowbug" in 1999) and also included B-sides and bonus tracks never released on record in Europe. There are the jazz veins of "Bach Ze (Edit)", the irresistible singability of "Checking In Checking Out", the acoustic-electronic melancholy of "Apricots", and finally the clear pianism of "The Dutchman". As if the Beach Boys and Steely Dan had truly merged into a single big band.

The High Llamas walk like tightrope walkers on the rope stretched between the cloying world of airport music and that incomprehensible and kaleidoscopic universe of auteur pop songs. They engage in an unexpectedly difficult art (tightrope walker Philippe Petit wrote: "The wire is not what one imagines. It is not the universe of lightness, space, smile. It is a craft. Sober, rough, discouraging."). The High Llamas walk that wire. Almost never falling.