The High Llamas (Brian Wilson, Beach Boys) - NEW 2CD

NEW/MINT 2CD - The High Llamas - Retrospective, Rarities & Instrumentals.

The subtle excellence of South London's High Llamas lends itself well to a compilation such as Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals. Although the songs on these two CDs span seven years, not much really changes in the musical world imagined by Sean O'Hagan and his collaborators. As the novelist Jonathan Coe admits in his sleeve notes, most High Llamas songs sound alike, "Until you tune in to Sean's peculiar wavelength, and then you can hear the tiny but at the same time momentous differences."

Retrospective..., then, is a frequently entrancing study of a band discovering the infinite possibilities of a limited sound. The High Llamas, as has often been noted, take the steady progressions, bleary harmonies and necessarily cautious pacing of late-60s Beach Boys and make vast experimental capital out of them. Sometimes, they'll hatch a graceful orchestral fantasia such as "Sparkle Up", or strip things down to the burbling minimalism of "Showstop (Op Art Informal)", to a broadly identical end: classic rock, pop and lounge reinvented by unflappable modernists.

CD2 is especially rewarding, with a raft of abstractions mostly unreleased in the UK: the titles of "Vampo Brazil" and "Hi Ball Nova Scotia" reveal more about the homely exotica of this music than any number of theories. And constantly, there's that strange discipline, that reining in of the flourishes, indulgences and clichés of most rock, which proves to be perversely liberating.

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