Here Come The Rattling Trees

 In lesser hands, an album like Here Come the Rattling Trees – documenting music from a stage show – could be slight or unfulfilling. For The High Llamas, a group whose modular constructions lend themselves to such settings, there’s no hurdle: Here Come the Rattling Trees hangs together perfectly, and may even be more compelling for its episodic focus. There are six stories here, each of them playing out in an urban setting – it feels like a natural extension of Sean O’Hagan’s lyric writing, which abstracts the emotional through the environments of everyday life, and his melodies and arrangement, which are both hung along the line spooled out of his chord changes. Really, The High Llamas music is all about that – the evocative power of chord changes, the way they can suggest, shift, dictate mood, and the beauty and spirit they carry.