High Llamas

High Llamas

Hey Panda

Drag City

***High Llamas present Hey Panda—a modern pop music/deep listening experience that could only issue forth from their personal quadrant of the galaxy. Hey Panda projects soulfully through an enervating abstract of today’s popular music; the sound of the Llamas’ stately melodies and expressive ditties laid open—blissfully shattered—with drums and vocals hitting different, burning sounds and contemporary production twists pulling the ear at every turn. For the past few decades, High Llamas have trafficked in contemporary pop sounds directed toward the avant end of the spectrum as much as not. But here the message was clear. Llamas’ composer-in-residence Sean O’Hagan was determined to let go. Hey Panda does just that, with a set of tunes reflecting on multiple levels how definitions change over the course of a lifetime, radiating an optimism derived from the diverse conundrums of today.

High Llamas

Talahomi Way

Drag City

***BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL!!! For the past eighteen years, THE HIGH LLAMAS have been following their own lights, making records, and essentially occupying their own genre in doing so. Their music is timeless; elements of retro and modern share the space, creating a unique time and place that is outside the lines of history as we experience it. Talahomi Way is the latest evolution in their body of work, a record that will please those who enjoy their musical adventures while also providing a draft of their eternal mystery to neophyte listeners. In the course of their post-millennial albums, The High Llamas sound has shifted subtly into a more organic setting—gone are the slick, electric-band settings of their great ‘90s albums Gideon Gaye, Hawaii and the rest. With 2003’s Beet Maize and Corn, Can Cladders (2007), and now Talahomi Way, their arrangements have breathed with acoustic space, giving the music a more intimate, personal resonance. Still, SEAN O’HAGAN’s lyric-writing is in the great traditions of the American and British 20th century songbook: story-songs, impressionistic feel-pieces, crafted without an aim towards personal exposition. Even so, their set and focus provide a view to the world as he sees it. No Export to Europe. No CD export to Japan.

High Llamas

Here Come The Rattling Trees

Drag City

***While cycling around his home-district of Peckham (in southeast London) a few years ago, SEAN O'HAGEN decided that not only would the new HIGH LLAMAS music be driven by narratives, a collection of stories, but they would first have to be performed as theatre; reshaped theatre, if you like, blending stories, songs and soundtrack. It was essential for these performances to take place before the songs and underscores were recorded. The resultant piece, Here Come The Rattling Trees, introduces six characters, some real, some less so, whom Sean has encountered over past years in Peckham. It is also The High Llamas new LP. Here Come The Rattling Trees was first performed in the Montpelier Theatre pub in Peckham in June 2014, and in October 2014, it played for a week-long run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, London. With witty, artful musical strokes, Sean and The High Llamas have crafted deft musical sketches with the signature “Llamas” sound that has evolved over ten album releases since 1992. A colorful array of electric, acoustic, and synthetic instruments, alongside Sean O’Hagan’s gentled vocals, are deployed to transport the listener to the low-key highs and lows of the British working week—an incisive, sympathetic view to the wonders slipped in between the pages and too often passed over in everyday life. (STREET DATE - 1/22/2016)