The High Llamas : Buzzle Bee

On their 2000 release Buzzle Bee, the High Llamas offer a layered musical narrative. A passive, singing narrator pervades the album, watching the busy milieu of bustling bars, city limits, and crumbling buildings with the quiet detachment of a mere onlooker.

The High Llamas, fronted by singer/guitarist Sean O'Hagan, enlist the help of a number of noted musicians, including Stereolab vocalist Mary Hanson, to provide a backdrop for these lyrical observations. The arrangements often silence the narrator, relying largely on simple "lalala" vocals and instrumental sections. Ultimately, the perceptive narrator regains the forefront and bookends the album, promising to bequeath this collection of lyrical and sonic memories to the listener in the closer, "Bobby's Court."

The clean, minimal package design of the album belies its sophisticated musical structure. By layering simple riffs and melodies on top of each another, the High Llamas are able to create a complex whole out of diverse, discrete musical components. "Switch Pavilion" embodies this style as loopy keyboards, a strong bass, and the ubiquitous "lalala" enter and exit the song with beautiful abandon, all accompanied by a relentless, steady beat.

While Buzzle Bee may not take the loudest or most aggressive stance, its innovations lie in the subtle mastery of O'Hagan's songmanship. The music has an unobtrusive and ethereal quality that occasionally seems bland, but the Llamas know when to mix things up by adding musical anomalies like slide guitar and marimba. Electronic twangs juxtapose shakers, and layered keyboards reminiscent of the Beach Boys round out the High Llamas' sound. The introduction of "Sleeping Spray" is like a sonic staircase: the chord progression becomes sequentially lower, leading the listener into a song of varying tempos and offering glimpses of different images in the mind of the album's hovering—yet unseen—narrator.

Spurts of vibrating synthesizer punctuate O'Hagan's lyrics on "Get into the Galley Shop," illustrating the interplay of music and vocals in Buzzle Bee's narrative. In the rising and falling instrumental volume, a sonic cycle uniting the album's components is completed. While total cohesion is sometimes lost in the structural twists and turns, the experimental atmosphere of this release marks an interesting and complex effort by the High Llamas. (Drag City) —Julia Kripke

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