There's a point, early on tonight, when Sean O'Hagan sings, "Let's reclaim the past cos the future won't last," and, finally, it all makes sense. O'Hagan, as leader of The High Llamas, has spent nearly a decade now inventing an alternative history for classic pop. Imagine if Brazilian music had made a greater impact here than R&B, if minimalist composition beat off psychedelia, if history had taken weird twists instead of a linear route. The High Llamas sound like the end result of some fiendish time-travelling experiment.
Often, then, their music has a vague familiarity. O'Hagan must be heartily sick of the Beach Boys comparisons that've dogged him for years and, in truth, there isn't much of Wilson madness left in his gradually unravelling song-structures. But those straining three-part harmonies that drift in and out of many songs here provide an anchor, a safe point of entry. Essentially, they're where a great esoteric record collection fuses and mutates, where on 'The Sun Beats Down', say, you're forced to comprehend West Coast vocals, Brazilian melodies, jazz vibes, leafy exotica, German electronics and a certain English quaintness all at once.
They've been doing this since 1994's superb 'Gideon Gaye', of course, and the gently unstoppable 'Track Goes By', from that album, remains a highlight of the set. What has changed, though, is the size of the sound. Where once The High Llamas often resembled a decent-sized orchestra, with copious horns and strings, now they're down to a six-piece. O'Hagan was a dab hand at guitar solos in '80s indie heroes Microdisney and on his interim solo records, but now he seems to play fewer and fewer notes. You get the impression that he's following some hardline process of elimination in his music, cutting everything down to skeletal, unadorned forms.
It's often fascinating to hear, though it's hard not to feel nostalgic when confronted with these frail shadows of songs that used to be grandiose statements. Clearly, O'Hagan's made an artistic decision to scale down his castles in the air to a cottage industry, but you wonder where it'll all end. Perhaps The High Llamas are on the longest fade-out in musical history, gradually paring down their sound, cutting out more and more instruments, using fewer and fewer notes, until there's literally nothing left. Frustrating - but what a brilliant way to go.
