The High Llamas always seem more interesting when you're not actually listening to them. You hear the band's name and think, "Ah, that guy Sean O'Hagan, who arranges for and plays with Stereolab, he has his own band. He worships the 67-72 Beach Boys and is dying to work with Brian Wilson. That sounds like an interesting band." And then you actually put Hawaii or Cold and Bouncy on the hi-fi and, well... High Llamas are consistent and their records always sound nice, but they're rarely inspiring. Some vital spark is missing. Maybe it's O'Hagan's so-so voice, or that his arranging gifts outstrip his melodic skill. But High Llamas are a Consistently Slightly Better than OK Band, and not a lot more.

The two-disc Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals collection gathers 16 of the High Llamas' best songs on its first disc, and 15 additional b-sides and import-only bonus tracks on its second. It's an evenly spaced summary of the band's roughly ten years of existence, omitting only 2000's Drag City Release Buzzle Bee and the seriously underrated remix disc Lollo Rosso ("Shotop Hic Hup" is perhaps Mouse on Mars' best remix).

One thing the retrospective disc does particularly well is cherry-pick O'Hagan's best melodies. He's released plenty tracks with interesting harmonic movement and smartly layered instrumentation, but he hasn't written a ton of great, hummable songs. Hawaii's "Nomads" and "Literature Is Fluff", Gideon Gaye's "Checking In Checking Out", and Santa Barbara's "Apricots" are all there, for a few moments putting O'Hagan in Andy Partridge's league as a craftsman of quirky-but-catchy tunes.

The tracks not up to that songwriting standard get by on other virtues. Cold and Bouncy's "Three Point Scrabble" and "Glide Time" are from a time when the High Llamas were finding interesting ways to incorporate squishy electronics into their sound (Stereolab's similarly textured Dots and Loops came out four months earlier), and the luscious blend of the modular-synth stuff with the strings and vocal la-la-la's still sounds great.

The b-sides disc is obviously spottier. Culled equally from the same span of time as the best-of tracks, the rarities and instrumentals generally offer more of the same with slightly lower quality. The instrumentals are for the most part decent, but the vocal songs are utterly forgettable. Apparently, though O'Hagan undoubtedly can piece together tasteful instrumentals until the cows come home, he's unlikely to relegate an excellent song to a b-side.

Highlights here include the Snowbug-era "Beachy Bunch", which uses a broken steel drum as a lead instrument to great effect and features one of O'Hagan's more brilliant spare arrangements, and the sweet, swooning "It Might as Well Be Dumbo". The longer "suites"-- "Mini-Management" and "Cropduster"-- can't justify their runtimes (one is nine minutes, the other nearly eight), but "Janet Jangle" and "Over the River" show that O'Hagan can wring a fair amount of interest from extremely simple melodies, especially when he's using odd instrumental combinations like banjo, flute and Moog.

Like Madonna's The Immaculate Collection, the best-of disc from Retrospective is the sort of overview that's almost too well done: it sums up the artist's career to this point so completely you have to ask yourself whether you need anything more. O'Hagan's interest in "Let's Go Away for Awhile"-type interludes means that High Llamas records always have a certain amount of (admittedly relatively pleasant) filler. The first disc prunes the dull material and leaves the welcome highlights, so when you want a shot of High Llamas, Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals satisfies completely.