Here Come the Rattling Trees, the 11th studio album by baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas, exists as a means to an end. As the cover says, the music on this short and sweet LP was written by the group’s leader and principal songwriter Sean O’Hagan to accompany a theater production of the same name, with the brief interludes and tunes meant to be woven between monologues by the play’s six characters. Initially presented in October of 2014 at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s Covent Garden, the intention is to eventually take the show on a tour through Europe and the U.S. But since O’Hagan has no theatrical bona fides to speak of, the only way to make it happen is to treat it like the promotional campaign for a new record.
Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.
It’s a shame, too, because the play happens to be quite affecting. Rattling Trees uses extended anecdotes to comment on the rapid changes happening in London, particularly in Peckham, a region in the southeastern part of the city where O’Hagan has lived for over 20 years. As the performance moves along, we hear from a plumber, a cafe worker in her sixties, a decorator, a housewife, and a health fanatic, each lamenting or appreciating the monied middle class pouring into the neighborhood and bringing with them higher rents and expensive tastes.
With just the music to go by, the lyrics lose much of their impact. The references to the "slogans splashed above the mess that they made" in "McKain James" don’t stick as deep without first hearing the decorator tell of his youthful days spray-painting anarchist jeremiads on the walls of apartments he was contracted to work on (before covering the graffiti with wallpaper or a coat of paint). So, too, does the sparkling "Livorno" need the context of the plumber marveling at the pretentious attitudes of the bourgeois couple he’s working for to really give the song some weight. Other tracks fare better: The lovely "Jackie" leavens the melancholy of the cafe worker’s rather drab day-to-day existence with a bouncy, harpsichord-driven swing and an impeccable chorus, and the title track recalls the early solo efforts of Paul McCartney with bulbous bass tones and electric piano.
During the Covent Garden run of Rattling Trees, the members of the High Llamas were set onstage in a semicircle,with actors standing in the middle delivering their lines. This meant that O’Hagan was forced to strip back the instrumentation considerably, and he really rose to the challenge: Even without those extra Van Dyke Parks-like splashes of symphonic color, the album is still instantly recognizable as a High Llamas production. Instead, the space gets filled with quick stabs of upright piano or wah-wah-ed guitar lines or, on the plucky "Mona’s Song," some tight vocal harmonies repeating a single phrase.
The play is set in front of an old leisure centre that has been bought up by a larger company and rebranded with a new name and look. As each character enters the show, they comment on this change, often wondering why the change needed to happen. Though O’Hagan surely didn’t mean it as such, that stands as a tidy metaphor for the pop music landscape that he and his Llamas enter into every few years or so. For 25 years now, the project has wondered aloud why the songwriters of the world needed to step out of the warm bath of the orchestral pop and exotica sounds of the '60s and '70s. We can admire him for staying the course all this while, but we also need to ask: Even when the music is wrapped up within the framework of a theater performance, will there be anyone listening?
