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Can Cladders
What clearly sets the High Llamas apart, however, is O'Hagan's tendency toward retro-futurism, which results in the unique confluence of string quartets with hi-fi lounge-pop instrumentation (organ, vibraphone, clarinet), occasionally drifting toward exotica, the late-50s big band- and Latin-influenced instrumental music that attempted to evoke lush, tropical, and faraway imagined lands. The danger of this approach, of course, is that High Llamas songs are often (especially lately) overburdened, with excessive ingredients outweighing songcraft. Thankfully, Cladders avoids this crutch, and consequently emerges as the most enjoyable High Llamas record in over a decade.
-Eric Harvey, February 21, 2007
Over their fifteen-year tenure, The High Llamas have written some of the most richly constructed and oddly affecting pop music since The Beach Boys’ disarmingly humble pop fantasias on Friends and Surf’s Up, or the post-Tropicalia sweetness and modernist impulses of Brazilian artists like Marcos Valle, Joyce, Milton Nascimento and Lo Bôrges. The group have also drawn on 1950s pop arrangements, English jazz and Canterbury prog, 1970s singer-songwriters, German electronica, Italian soundtrack music, French pop and American post-rock to create a self-styled universe where songs are pliable, mutable sculptures.
It’s an approach to the song - as conduit for shared experience, as an access moment for community - that resonates with O’Hagan’s own writing: his dream of an egalitarian song that rings true, a benign, generous and unpretentious song that collapses the false divide between experiment and accessibility. “Your instinct leads you to write in a way which satisfies your artistic intentions and if you are strong you stick to your guns. If the high street likes your music, so be it. If the avant-garde embrace you, so be it, just as long as they do not abuse a non-believer for not being on message.” O’Hagan pauses before concluding, with a gentle nod, “It’s the music and not the lifestyle that is important.”
Originally published in Signal To Noise #45, Spring 2007. With thanks to editor Pete Gershon for granting permission for this republication.
John Dale Signal to Noise
Four years in the making, Can Cladders could have come off the presses as an indulgent, overwrought opus. Instead, it simply (but oh-so-craftily) distilled a career's worth of creative tangents into one solid, focused effort that, if you're observant enough, holds its own amongst the likes of the Llamas' comparative "elite."
J.Scott McClintock
It remains slightly damning that bands like The High Llamas—the ones that draw on limited, recognizable influences—generally aren't as adventurous or inspired as the musicians they favor. But by this point, The High Llamas' version of resort-chic-pop has become almost idiosyncratically their own. And it helps that Can Cladders gets through 13 songs in just under 40 minutes, with no waste and no excess. It's not a grand departure, just the best album yet by one of the modern-rock era's most loveable bands.
Noel Murphy The Onion
Say Hi to the Rivers and theMountains
And the band plays on...
Euan Ferguson
The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009
In the gloopy cauldron of artistic cross-dressing, whereby someone famous for one discipline decides to embrace the passion they "really" wanted to pursue, many bad eggs bubble sulphurously. Actors who want to write, singers who want to act, footballers who want to try poetry. Poets who, Lord save us, want to play football.
One of the more historically successful categories of this cross-dressing, though, involves writers who want to get involved with music. Novelist Jonathan Coe, music-lover and frustrated pianist in real life, is the latest, having written a... well, not a musical, exactly: but his words, in the form of a play, are spoken, while the music of cult pop band the High Llamas plays in the background. Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains is the result, and it really does sound intriguing. Coe attempted to explain how it wasn't really a musical, nor a concert, not a play, but more of a something else.
Not a musical, so what, exactly?
There's not really a term for it, so I'm calling it spoken musical theatre. Three actors perform basically a play, but my thinking is probably closest to the way language and music relate to each other in films. I listened to the High Llamas' back-catalogue - I've been a friend of [the band's songwriter] Sean O'Hagan for 10 years - and then wrote, timed, structured the monologues and conversations accordingly, dependent on much going on in the music. So, in a way, a play, but the speech is notated to match the Llamas' playing.
What are your musical influences?
When the music all went a bit wrong in the 80s, I turned of course to the Smiths, Prefab Sprout. Then, along came the High Llamas... all of that, and more, seeming to incorporate Ravel, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa. it was like I'd discovered the world's most perfect band.
The show is a tale of a love affair, over 40 years, between someone growing up in the grim Sixtiesness of London's Robin Hood Estate, and the daughter of one of the architects responsible.
How would you describe it?
There is loss. There is regret. There is, of course, always the music, which is ultimately uplifting.
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