Features Disc of the day
The High Llamas
Gideon Gaye
(Alpaca Park, 1994)
Holding a torch for Brian Wilson when the world had given up on him.
Travel with me to an unfamiliar past, where alternative rock music is yet to be overrun with Pet Sounds references, when not one but two brand new Brian Wilson albums - Orange Crate Art, and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, both 1994 - could appear to a universal shrug. A time, in other words, before Gideon Gaye re-sold the marvels of the Beach Boys' heterogeneous, post-psychedelic soundworld to a whole new generation of musos. Banjo, tack piano, strings, tuned percussion, all rushed in on the coattails of ex-Microdisney man Sean O'Hagan's second full album under his Andean camelid moniker, but it's so much more than the sum of its Van Dyke Parks cast-offs, and remains an object lesson in how to use inspiration to unlock the doors to exploration. From the instant weirdness of Giddy Strings' woozy overture and the piano-laden reverie of The Dutchman, this is antic pop, played for kicks, as exemplified by the blithe wordplay of vintage keyboard choogle Giddy & Gay and the cocked eyebrow that turns gorgeous country-pop canter Checking In, Checking Out into the vehicle for a Steely Dan picaresque of West Coast detachment, complete with Carmelites and joggers. Roy Budd, Burt Bacharach and The Fifth Dimension hover in the wings, offering asides, and a nagging note of mourning tugs at the sleeve. And if none of that sounds quite, well, heavy enough for your tastes, then turn on to the trippy, quarter-hour ur-groove of Track Goes By, with its aeriform Marcel Corientes flute freakout straight out of the David Axelrod playbook. Recently, O'Hagan has waxed fashionably multi-media, making musical paintings with artist Jean Pierre Muller and orch-literature with Rotter's Club novelist Jonathan Coe; as a bracing dose of Gideon Gaye can't help but remind you, a return to recording is somewhat overdue.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 28/01/2010
Further Listening
The High Llamas - Hawaii (V2, 1996)
Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle (Warner Bros, 1968)
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