While your first impression of Town and Country might well be "Hmmm…sounds like Llamas of Only Middling Elevation," in fact Terry Miles (who essentially is Ashley Park in the way Sean O'Hagan is the High Llamas) brings plenty of his own sensibility to this CD. Miles plays a whole raft of instruments, from guitars to pianos, organs, the occasional synth, and melodica, and dresses up his mid-sixties influences in trumpet, banjo, cello, and the like, yet his songs seem to be harmonically closer to the Beatles/Kinks axis of sophisticated pop than to the Beach Boys-into-Steely Dan extended, jazz-derived harmonies that sometimes flavor O'Hagan's writing. Miles' lyrics are cinematic and less impressionistic or purely functional. And despite some neo-jetset hallmarks - the mid-sixties fetish, the orchestral instruments, the film fixation - Ashley Park's Town and Country avoids the kitsch and schmaltz that sometimes mar that genre.

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