Sean O’Hagan has made a career out of charming, densely arranged music that borrows and builds upon the past. With the High Llamas, inspiration has taken on many forms since their 1990 inception. Never before, though, has O’Hagan’s output required such equal involvement from its audience as it has on the band’s 12th studio album, Here Come the Rattling Trees.
There’s a perfectly easy explanation for the immediate autonomy of this record from a lot of other High Llamas efforts. O’Hagan endeavored to piece together a narrative-driven project to what ended up being a multidisciplinary work, consisting of songs, stories and soundtrack. The resultant live show enjoyed a week-long run at a London theater, with the album being the more permanent contingent of the project. What’s left is predictably lush, salient musicianship and a childlike panorama of sounds that should make you think of a bustling work day in any town square.
In many ways, the instrumentals of Here Come the Rattling Trees feel like the Llamas of old, O’Hagan channeling the electric lullaby of “Glide Time” from 1998’s Cold and Bouncy on tunes like “Mona Underscore – Slow Down Mona,” a splashy song coaxing whimsical melodies from xylophones, congas and acoustic guitar. Also easily loved on first listen and every listen thereafter is the album’s intoxicating title track, O’Hagan exploring the kind of art-folk lounge vibe he’s been perfecting for over 20 years.
That the album overviews the intertwining lives of six characters means that there are introductory soundtrack vignettes (ostensibly for entrances of characters) followed by tunes that delve deeper into each character’s situation, psyche and so on (the more fully realized songs, complete with vocals). Guiding the thread through the weaving of the narrative is easy enough if you’re paying close attention to O’Hagan’s lyrics and the moods of the movements, but the collection-as-aural-embodiment of something you cannot see is both a blessing and a curse.
The songs themselves are beautifully orchestrated, as you’d expect from an artist so steeped in the lineage of OCD producers/arrangers, and Here Come the Rattling Trees is a wonderfully delightful thing to have on in the background while doing just about anything. As a cohesive statement, though, the album falls short of gelling, piecemealed as it is from fragments of a larger artistic vision.