A band named after the cutest pack animals EVER!
The High Llamas — Put Yourself Down
(from the CD Santa Barbara, Alpaca Park Records 1992)
On one of the places I hang out online — because one benefit of self-employment is the fact that only the federal government can track your net usage during workhours — someone whose musical opinion I tend to respect recently busted out the received wisdom on the High Llamas. I believe the direct quote was something along the lines of “Stewart, you’re full of shit and that Sean guy is nothing but a Brian Wilson ass-kisser.” I mostly just feel kind of bad for folks who spout that line about the High Llamas, because it suggests that either they’ve never really heard the High Llamas or they’ve never really heard the Beach Boys, or both, because honestly, it’s a point easily disproven. Brian Wilson’s influence is, for certain, all over 1994’s Gideon Gaye: that album’s key track, “The Goat Looks On,” rather blatantly swipes the melody from “Let’s Go Away For A While,” for one thing. But that’s the only High Llamas album out of nine (if you count Sean’s post-Microdisney solo album, High Llamas, as an HL record, which I tend to do) on which Wilson is the key influence. Although I suspect that Sean O’Hagan would be the first to tell you that the High Llamas’ albums are unapologetically heavily influenced by whatever he’d been listening to when he was writing and recording the album, and that while those records are filled with sly allusions, conscious homages, and occasionally outright mimicry, the beauty of the records is in the way that O’Hagan and his cohorts assemble those influences into a style that sounds demonstrably like the High Llamas. Basically, what I’m saying is this: if you listened to all of the High Llamas records with an ear towards cataloguing every artist and musical style O’Hagan is overtly influenced by, Brian Wilson would end up, at best, somewhere around #5. It’s just that he’s so much better known to the average indie rock listener than, say, Mouse on Mars and Caetano Veloso that the tag has stuck.
These are the first and last tracks from the first proper High Llamas album, 1992’s Santa Barbara. “Put Yourself Down,” to my ears, makes plain the one band that are the single key influence on Sean O’Hagan’s music: that first 15 seconds of heavily compressed electric piano and effects-box-heavy guitar positively scream Steely Dan to me. (I interviewed O’Hagan nearly 10 years ago, around the time Cold and Bouncy came out, and he confirmed that he’s a massive Steely Dan fan.) But the addition of that folky repeated mandolin riff that decorates the verse, the “Needles and Pins” jangle of the rhythm guitar fill in the chorus, and those backing vocals straight out of 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love,” not to mention perfect little touches like that barely audible, Betty Boop-pitched female harmony vocal on the choruses, just prove to me that Sean O’Hagan is a consummate pop fan, one who loves his favorite songs so much that they recombine themselves naturally in his songwriting DNA. (Andy Partridge is another songwriter who I think tends to do the same thing, but he’s never seemed to like as much different stuff as O’Hagan does, and as his own musical interests have apparently dwindled down to obsessive listening to his four or five favorite UK pop albums from ‘67 to ‘73, Partridge’s songwriting has gotten progressively less interesting to me.)
“Apricots,” on the other hand, doesn’t sound much like anyone in particular to me: maybe a little more 10cc, some psych-era Beatles and perhaps, indeed, a touch of Beach Boys in those overdubbed layers of electronically processed harmonies and backwards guitars, but not so much that it sounds like an overt homage. The lyrics, though fragmentary and elliptical — and further masked by the deliberately odd phrasing — have always struck me as painfully sad in a way that I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on. The ending, a (staged? real? I have never been able to decide) argument between an obstinate little girl and her at-wits-end mother, moves from sad to downright unsettling: my wife once asked me to avoid playing this song in her presence because the last minute or so makes her genuinely upset.
–Stewart Mason
