The High Llamas Talahomi Way

If the experimental end of Easy Listening still has to be easy on the ear, then maybe it’s a genre that needs to be refined rather than pushed to new extremes. On Talahomi Way the horn section is planed to a smooth veneer; the strings swirl upwards; the tempo is kept on an even keel; the harmonies are mannered. There’s an air of unforced politeness in the way that the players wait their turn to add a phrase of the melody, or to layer some small detail. The nearest the album gets to derailing comes on A Rock In May which seems to have been built around a slightly off-key organ. Even then it’s charmingly discordant. Chamber music gently brought to a gentle canter. 

The inherent danger of composing songs so lacking in visible joins is their tendency to slide right off the attention, drifting past, barely-acknowledged, on their own understated loveliness. A cursory airing of Talahomi Way and you might fail to notice the underlying complexity in the music, or overlook what a unique lyricist Sean O’Hagen is, capable of conveying a scene with a few well chosen lines, and prone to odd choices of subject matter. One early High Llamas song – The Goat Looks On – centred on the collective helplessness felt by a small crowd of locals, protesting the construction of a new supermarket. Apricots – another early song – was written from the perspective of an accountant, following a stock market crash, sitting alone in his house eating fruit out of a can.

In keeping with this tradition, The Ring Of Gold, which appears as Talahomi Way approaches its halfway point, sidesteps obvious interpretations of the title and instead turns out to be the name of retired racehorse put out to pasture. The lyrics follow the old champion, with the layout of every racecourse he’s ever contested hardwired into his brain, as he spends his dotage in the shade of a tree, or perhaps wandering to the bottom of the lane that leads down from his stable, accompanied by an unevenly spirited ‘clip-clop clip-clop, clip’ beat.

It’s these gentle, off-kilter rhythms that give the album its lift. Wander, Jack Wander glides past on spotty, arrhythmic metronome. To The Abbey is beautified by oriental flourishes on the xylophone, while the chirpy Take My Hand is pegged-out with the light patter of its pots and pans percussion. At the heart of Woven And Rolled, what sounds like Morse Code being tapped-out on the rim of a wine glass is joined partway through by the real thing.

After the contemporary feel of the first couple of High Llamas albums, the band seemed to slip conceptually into a halcyon, button-down version of the 1960s. Often listening to their music is the aural equivalent of watching a photo slideshow of a holiday that your grandparents, or great grandparents might have taken when trips abroad were still an expensive novelty – the small hotels and the old-fashioned planes.

A loose thread, both in the music and the lyrics, joins these songs together. The protagonist in Berry Adams, late for work and daydreaming of being even further afield, turns up again later, mentioned in passing on Fly Baby Fly. In common with many of the tracks here, the former song’s extended instrumental coda fades into another shorter instrumental passage, in this case 25 seconds of sedate tabla and gloopy electronics. Somewhat mystifyingly on the second half of the album, two of these short pieces are allotted their own track status, rather than being tagged onto the end of what came before.

Appropriately for an album that presents songs as a sequence of vaguely connected scenes, the coda – Calling Up, Ringing Down – sees the set being dismantled. “The film makers have gone with their ‘action,’ the walls no longer move,” sings O’Hagen. In fact Talahomi Way is so strongly rooted in a sense of location that it makes little sense in transit on a pair of headphones, where its fine detail is compressed and channelled directly into your ears, and the images painted by the lyrics are forced to compete with your own changing scenery. Music like this needs to inhabit a space, preferably a sunny one.