What does it sound like?:
This isn’t really a review as such. I’ve just been listening to this album again today for the first time in a few years and forgot just how good it was, so I wanted to rave about it a bit and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t heard it.
Describing it is very very easy, and it’s the kind of record you know within about 2 minutes whether you’re going to like it or not – you could pretty much pick any track and just drop in there and see what you think. Basically, it’s like a mid-90s update of that Pet Sounds/ Smile Beach Boys sound (chamber pop with lush instrumentation), with a few electronic bells, whistles and Moogs blended in.
That makes it sound like a pastiche, but it’s adept enough to rise above that. I know next to nothing of the band, and this record passed me by when it first came out in 1996, but I understand they were kind of grouped somewhere between the trends for retro pop and easy listening, kind of Air meets Mike Flowers Pops.
What does it all *mean*?
It’s just a beautiful album. I don’t think it says anything particularly poetic or memorable, and the songs all blend together into one big mesh, but has a loveliness that just draws you in. In common with many CD albums in the mid 90s, it’s 75 minutes long, but it’s one of the (very few) albums where I think that’s justified.
Goes well with…
Pet Sounds, obviously.
Release Date:
Some time in 1996
Might suit people who like…
Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks, maybe Stereolab (the main guy was in Stereolab for a while I believe).
Wasn’t he also in Microdisney before that? I remember seeing The High Llamas with a few friends of mine, who were proper fans, at Bush Hall in about 2005 and thinking I should investigate a bit more. My loss that I never really got round to it.
I bought this album when it was first released on the strength of a rave review in Mojo magazine. It was a boiling hot summer’s day and I listened to while having a few beers. A wonderful experience. I also have their albums, “Beat, Maize and Corn”, “Cold and Bouncy” , “Retrospective, Rarities and Instumentals” and “Gideon’s Gaye”. All brilliant. They also do a wonderful cover of Nick Drake’s “Chime of a City Clock”.
It’s a wonderful album. I bought Gideon Gaye on the strength of a Mojo review & then got this as soon as it was released. Reviews mentioned Steely Dan, Burt Bacharach, and John Barry, but the main influence is Brian Wilson.
For me, they never matched this album, but always enjoyed the follow ups.
I may also have bought it thanks to that Mojo review and I’m glad I did. It’s a great album full of the influences of Brian Wilson. ‘Air meets Mike Flowers’ I don’t hear that and I’m thankful I don’t otherwise thanks for the review @Arthur-Cowslip
The Mike Flowers comment is offensive. As is any mention of Mike Flowers. Bobby Davro with a music degree. Fuck off.
Ha ha, I was struggling to compare it with something else from the same period, and that’s where my mind went 🙂
Love the Llamas. Cold and Bouncy is my favourite, with Beets Maize and Corn a close second. Dreamy loveliness.
I think Cold and Bouncy was named after a comment on regional airlines made by Bill Bryson in one of his columns, subsequently reprinted in Notes From a Big Country.
What a great reminder to pull this out of the shelf and spin it again. I too also have several of their albums (plus Sean O’Hagan’s first solo foray using the same title), and indeed they all have unique charm. My initial way in was via the single from ‘Gideon Gaye’.
Here it is, with its partly familiar chord progression, made more interesting with lots of little Dan twists here and there, a rambling guitar part and an intriguing lyric that also manages to echo a distinctly Steely touch but with added harmonic Wilson vibes.
Just what is that song all about? No, really about?
The lyrics on C & B are agreeably nuts. This for example.
Having loved SO’H from his days in Microdisney., been a huge fan of Gideon Gay and Hawaii.
Very fortunate to get to see Microdisney at Vicar Street in Dublin on their second last performance.
Odd how beautifully SO’H’s melodic chops complimented Cathal C’s unashamedly abrasive lyrics on songs like The Rack
Go compare
Ha, sometimes I’m more right than I know.
The first is gorgeous. The second is dogshit ‘ironic easy listening’. That’s my 2p.
I found the High Llamas almost by accident (charity shop buy) and I love Sean’s Music, especially Hawaii. He gets that melody doesn’t have to take you where you expect it to go, sometimes the chords take you somewhere unexpected and wonderful. That’s what he has in common with Brian Wilson and Bacharach – not some retro Austin Powers-suited bobbins.
I was a fan of Microdisney and have a few High Llamas CDs. I find that I have to be in a very specific mood to put them on because they don’t just serve as background music. I’m not much of a fan of the Beach Boys stuff that it pays tribute to so I like it for itself.
My contribution to this thread is that I saw the High Llamas as Arthur Lee’s backing band at the Garage in Islington in 1994 (thanks Google!) I would have to say that I’m also no fan of Arthur Lee or Love so I can’t really comment on whether he was at his best or not. The gig hasn’t lived on in my memory apart from a scene at the door where someone was giving a doorman dog’s abuse in a “…do you know who I am?* way. I hadn’t a clue who he was either so my sympathy was very much with the staff. I think it killed my buzz for the evening.
You can’t tell an anecdote like that without revealing who it was! 😄 I was waiting for. “… and you know who it was? … Marti Pellow”
Sod that, tell us about the doorman dog! Did he have a little hat on?
At their height (this album, Gideon Gaye and Santa Barbara) I loved the llamas like no other band since the 70s. Perfect review Arthur – it’s just beautiful music that touches the heartstrings and makes you Smile (pun intended).
Can I also recommend their mini-album Apricots? Picked up from a HMV bargain bin in Croydon, it’s the High Llamas I can do business with: full of Squeeze- and Steely Dan-like askew sentimental pop songs. I saw them at the Mean Fiddler soon after, and it was all a bit kraut-surf. I mean, the man’s a genius, but sometimes you want more songs and less precision noodling.
Apricots is a mini version of Santa Barbara which had a limited release and then kind of disappeared for a while. More conventional song structures than the subsequent ones.
Good to see Santa Barbara getting a mention. That and Gideon Gaye are keepers, but I can live without the Bleep n’ Booster years when he went all Stereolab on our arses.
There was an earlier solo album under his own name that was pretty decent, too. He ran out of songs just before he made Hawaii.
New album out in February.