High Llamas
Can Cladders
Release Date: Feb 20, 2007
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Drag City
Music Critic Score
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Album Review: Can Cladders by High Llamas
Very Good, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Over the course of their career, the High Llamas successfully combined '60s pop sensibilities with burbling analog synth accents and laid-back, West Coast vibes with a NYC session cat's journeyman aesthetic. Every Llamas album has embraced these creative styles in varying degrees: from Gideon Gaye's decidedly '60s Brit-pop bent, to Hawaii's sprawling and breezy beaches, to Cold and Bouncy's warmly clinical brand of slickness, to Beet, Maize & Corn's detailed chamber pop, the Llamas have succeeded at every slight stylistic turn they have taken. Now, with 2007's Can Cladders, O'Hagan and the Llamas are bringing it all together.
Based on rating 3/5
In a sense, Can Cladders sounds as perfect as a band's eighth album should. Impeccably produced, it's stately yet buoyant, its strings and harps and guitars and gentle drums moving together as naturally as a warm breeze through palm trees. And yet, listening to it is like being trapped in a gallery full of paintings by Georges Seurat: you know the technique is brilliant, but that doesn't stop it being mildly irritating.
Opinion: Fairly Good
Much like fellow Scot Momus, Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas is a pop music semiotician. Intentionally or not, he’s at his most compelling when he revels in the artifice of his own compositions. Can Cladders, the band’s string-laden eighth album, is just as much at ease with this as its predecessors. The album’s 13 insubstantial tracks make no concessions to contemporary ideas of ‘substance’ in pop music: they are exercises in style so formal they’re almost French.