THE HIGH LLAMAS
Santa Barbara (1992)
Gideon Gaye (1994)
Hawaii (1996)
Cold and Bouncy (1998)
Lollo Rosso (1998)
Snowbug (1999)
(Drag City)
Sean O’Hagan spent the 80s as the musical genius in cult Irish band Microdisney, providing the lush melodies that ironically underpinned Cathal Coughlan’s striking and angry lyrics. After Microdisney’s dissolution, O’Hagan would spend the 90s refining his unique musical vision, both as a collaborator and as the leader of his band the High Llamas. The High Llamas released some of the most extraordinary music of that decade, but despite an ardent cult following they remain perennially underrated. Now at long last, the High Llamas’ first six albums have been rereleased, brought back into print and given nice new vinyl editions by Drag City. This is a perfect opportunity for these wonderful albums to pick up some new fans, and for us to reflect on the High Llamas’ remarkable musical journey.
The name High Llamas came from a magazine photo of a Victorian-era hot air balloon that O’Hagan came across, and used for the title of his 1990 solo album. High Llamas would not set the world alight, but it saw O’Hagan joining forces with bassist John Fell, who would join O’Hagan with Marcus Holdaway on keyboards and cello and Tom Fenner on drums to form the first line-up of the High Llamas, the band.
SANTA BARBARA
The High Llamas put out a mini-album Apricots on Plastic Records, which would be expanded into a full LP by JBM later that same year called Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a perfectly respectable debut album, showing off the fledgling Llamas’ exquisite musicianship and O’Hagan’s ear for a good tune, but it shows few hints of the brilliance to come. In many ways, at this point in time the Llamas were a fairly traditional guitar-led power pop group. The album hints at O’Hagan’s more esoteric influences and the musical directions that would soon come to define the High Llamas, but for the most part it’s fairly conventional guitar pop fare, albeit done with O’Hagan’s consummate skill. There are lush Beatle-esque melodies, some arrangements ELO would be jealous off. O’Hagan’s oblique lyrics, sung in his sadly melodic voice, are already in place. But O’Hagan was unhappy with the results, and growing increasingly disillusioned with the state of modern guitar music, which he saw as corporate and unimaginative.
A musical meeting with Stereolab would prove to be the catalyst. The Lab’s Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier were chasing their own idiosyncratic muses, creating a retrofuturist music influenced equally by the minimalist krautrock of NEU! and the exploratory synthesizer textures of library music. Gane, Sadier and O’Hagan immediately saw themselves as kindred spirits, and O’Hagan would join Stereolab as a keyboardist, contributing as a full-time member for Mars Audiac Quintet (1994) and remaining an auxiliary member for longer, providing the inventive orchestral arrangements for Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) and Dots and Loops (1997). Working with Stereolab reinvigorated O’Hagan, and, with new drummer Rob Alum added to the ranks, High Llamas would go on to create their first masterpiece, 1994’s Gideon Gaye, released on Target.
GIDEON GAYE
From the cover, which uses the same font, typeface and layout as Van Dyke Park’s Song Cycle (1967), it’s clear that Gideon Gaye is a much more confident album than Santa Barbara, immediately pointing to the context and influences it would like to be considered alongside. A case of literally wearing one’s influences on one’s sleeve, Gideon Gaye sees the High Llamas leaving their power pop past behind and embracing the sunny harmonies of Brian Wilson, the lush orchestration of Parks, the sumptuously smooth yet deceptively complicated arrangements of Steely Dan. At the height of Britpop’s trad guitar rock revivalism and grunge’s metal and punk-infused angst, here was a record intentionally modeled on the Beach Boys’ lost Smile album. The Beach Boys have subsequently been reclaimed as a key influence in modern music, but in the 90s their stock was at its lowest. Smile, at this point, was the long lost follow up to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, rumoured to be Brian Wilson’s masterpiece but left uncompleted until Wilson released a newly recorded version in 2004. In 1994, it seemed a sure bet that it would remain unfinished and unreleased forever.
O’Hagan’s expert deployment of Wilson’s influence was a huge contributing factor to the band’s music being rediscovered and reassessed by a new generation of hipsters. But Gideon Gaye is far from merely a Brian Wilson pastiche. Learning from his experience in Stereolab, O’Hagan emerges as one of the decade’s key proponents of postmodern retrofuturist rock. As with Stereolab, the objective is not to slavishly recreate the past, but to reimagine what the past, and therefore our current present day, could have been. O’Hagan builds the Beach Boys sound from the ground up, but instead of using the early rock and roll influences that fed into the Beach Boys, O’Hagan uses as his building blocks library music, krautrock and smooth jazz. Gideon Gaye is, like Pet Sounds and Smile, a song cycle. But it’s a song cycle that makes space for the Steely Dan melodic hooks of ‘Checking In, Checking Out’, and for ‘Track Goes By’ to finish a richly harmonic song with ten minutes of minimalist krautrock drone overlaid with Martin Denny flute. More than that, it’s a song cycle about the difficulties of writing a song cycle. In the lyrics throughout the album, O’Hagan sweetly but resignedly acknowledges that the vagaries of the real world mean that he will never be able to fully recreate the sound in his head on record. Gideon Gaye is not just a eulogy to Wilson’s Smile, but a paean to every masterpiece left unrealized because of the impossibility of birthing perfect art in an imperfect world.
HAWAII
Spurred on by the artistic success of Gideon Gaye, the Llamas’ next album Hawaii (1996), the first released on the band’s own Alpaca Park label, was if anything even more ambitious. Joined by John Bennett on guitar, Hawaii is in many ways the equivalent of a sprawling 70s double album. Once again interested in the gaps between perception and reality, this time O’Hagan turns his gaze outwards with a set of lyrics that reflect on nomadism, migration and colonialism. The cover shows an idealized, naïve-style cartoon illustration of Hawaii. With his love of Martin Denny-derived exotica, O’Hagan is interested in Hawaii as an idealized holiday location, but undercutting the sweeping strings and sleepy Hawaiian guitars are lyrics laden with sadness at how turning the island into a holiday resort erases the indigenous population.
The album is seeped in a nostalgia for vanished ways of living. As a result it’s a somewhat darker album than Gideon Gaye. The shimmering surfaces are troubled by sudden washes of discordant strings. Elegiac trumpet solos are undercut by bubbling electronics. The cracks in the paradise of the mind that O’Hagan found with Gideon Gaye are starting to show. However, for all these hints of darkness underneath, Hawaii is still a lushly beautiful recording. Gorgeous orchestral arrangements abound, wordless vocal harmonies swell up over impeccable piano chords. And before we can take the album too seriously, ‘Literature is Fluff’ throws seriousness and academic analysis against the wall in frustration:
“Take care to avoid the heavy stuff
I give up, this literature is fluff.”
COLD AND BOUNCY
Cold and Bouncy (1998), released on V2 records, began as part of a projected collaboration between O’Hagan and his heroes the Beach Boys which sadly never came to fruition. Cold and Bouncy is, however, the High Llamas’ third masterpiece in a row. With the Llamas’ line-up stabilised, Cold and Bouncy sees O’Hagan’s krautrock and electronica influences moving to the surface. In some ways, it feels like a companion piece to Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, released a year earlier. That album saw Stereolab moving away from the noisier krautrock side of their sound towards a gentler, more library music and exotica-influenced sound. Cold and Bouncy, which could have doubled as a description for both records, sees O’Hagan moving in the opposite direction towards Stereolab, with the two albums meeting somewhere in the middle. Which is not to say that the lush orchestrations disappear completely – the album contains some of O’Hagan’s most beautiful arrangements. But this time, they are paired with the cold textures and percussive drives of vintage synthesisers and keyboards. If this might make it more forbidding on the surface than the openly welcoming acoustic warmth of Gideon Gaye and Hawaii, there are still spaces for O’Hagan to display his undoubted pop nouse on the catchy and rousing ‘Showstop Hip Hop’ and the lazy and blissed out ‘The Sun Beats Down’, a summer hit in a better alternate dimension.
LOLLO ROSSO
Doubling down on Cold and Bouncy’s link to experimental electronic music, it was followed up by Lollo Rosso later the same year, a remix album where tracks from Cold and Bouncy were reworked by electronic avant-garde’s brightest and finest, from Mouse on Mars to Schneider TM and Jim O’Rourke. Lollo Rosso is a less rewarding listen than the High Llamas albums proper, but it contains some remarkable music, as well as some noble but failed experiments, as artists more used to working with beats and rhythms experiment with the High Llamas’ tuneful melodies and dense harmonies. If not entirely successful, its high points are worth seeking out, and it cemented the High Llamas’ place in the modern avant-garde whilst pointing out potential new directions the band could travel in.
SNOWBUG
The Llamas closed out the 90s with Snowbug (1999), again released on V2. The album is a favourite of O’Hagan, but sadly was overshadowed by the legacy of the previous three albums, and coming out at the arse-end of Britpop during one of music’s most dire periods, it didn’t sell as many copies as it should have. This indeed is a great shame. I won’t pretend to be objective about this, as Snowbug was the first High Llamas album I heard, and the one that made me a fan.
Listened to today, it lacks the widescreen ambition of Gideon Gaye, Hawaii and Cold and Bouncy, but it makes up for this with an organic easiness that the High Llamas simply hadn’t achieved on record until now. It’s also the album where O’Hagan’s Brazilian pop and bossa nova influences come to the fore. This gives Snowbug a warmth that Cold and Bouncy was lacking. Lead single ‘Cookie Bay’, sung by Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, should have been hailed as one of the great indie singles of the era, and opener ‘Back Ze’ features the best Steely Dan chorus that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker never got round to writing. Closer ‘Cut the Dummy Loose’ anticipates Ghost Box records and the whole hauntology musical movement, which O’Hagan, by bringing library music and exotica into the vocabulary of rock’s avant-garde, deserves more credit for helping inspire. Sadly, Snowbug’s lacklustre press reception and poor sales saw the end of the Llamas’ relationship with V2 records and the end of that phase of their career.
Since the turn of the millennium, the High Llamas have released six albums, mostly on Drag City, with increasing gaps of time in between them as O’Hagan and his band members busy themselves with other projects. While the music remained of a high quality, the band would never quite capture the commercial peak of their late 90s heyday. Last year’s Hey Panda ranks as one of the Llamas’ boldest and best, and sees O’Hagan opening up the classic High Llamas sound by embracing his love of modern R&B and hip hop. It’s clear that O’Hagan and the High Llamas still have artistic powder to burn. But much of their legacy will remain tied to the extraordinary records they recorded and released in the 90s. These records remain essential documents of one of indie music’s true originals, as stubbornly out of time now as they were on their initial release. In the three decades since, indie music, through the likes of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, moved away from its noisy roots to embrace exactly the kind of widescreen orchestral conceptual pop the High Llamas made their own. Yet few have done it with O’Hagan’s harmonic sophistication, his inventiveness at arrangements, his effortless ability to bridge the worlds of baroque orchestral pop, easy listening and the avant-garde. And no one is likely to since.
