Pitchfork

After 2003's Beet, Maize & Corn, Sean O'Hagan undertook a project with artist Pierre Muller to create "Musical Wheel", a web-based collaboration between O'Hagan's music and Muller's paintings. Those who've followed the High Llamas over the past decade and a half, however, may have seen that project as simply a continuation of what O'Hagan had been doing all along. After all, even the Llamas' album covers-- from the transparent modernist linearity of Gideon Gaye's cover collage (a skyscraper, village houses, and a castle juxtaposed against an expressionistic sunrise) to Hawaii's Howard Finster folk art style and bold vacation brochure lettering, to the modernist simplicity of Snowbug and Buzzle Bee-- have always mirrored the music.

Though he's garnered constant (yet fair) comparisons throughout his career to Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach, Sean O'Hagan's music under the High Llamas banner is as much a pastiche as those album covers. While his delicate melodies and motley arrangements certainly channel his 60s pop heroes, his clear affinity for the bucolic British countryside suggests a similar affinity for the pristine studio-bound daydreams of XTC's Skylarking and Apple Venus, Vol. 1.

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.

Can Cladders finds O'Hagan balancing his arch musical tendencies with a bounce and sway nearly absent from its largely rhythmless predecessor. "Winter's Day", a blithely told tale of an art theft, opens with a clop-clop canter before giving way to multi-tracked female voices vamping the titular phrase over jazz guitar and rolling piano. It's as close to blue-eyed soul as O'Hagan gets, and, along with the cooed doo-wop chorus of "Clarion Union Hall", suggests his appreciation for the willowy R&B of Scritti Politti. Similarly, the ska-inflected verses of "Honeytrop" give way to the ethereal strings of its chorus, and on "Bacaroo", a lonely, minimalist organ swing periodically emerges from its gossamer surroundings, only to quickly disappear again.

O'Hagan's unique lyrical approach remains intact, with each song a distinct, finely detailed set piece. After establishing the scene of "The Old Spring Town" with "The frost is on the ground, and the ferry's far away," he resurrects Hawaii's touristic wanderlust with a question: "How many times have you been to Mexico?" On "Sailing Bells", O'Hagan's attention is drawn from the ships at sea to the sounds around him, as well as the particular manner in which "the little rocks lay low on the tideline." "Dorothy Ashby" is Cladders' most affecting moment, with O'Hagan eulogizing the jazz harpist in her own element: "Down the concrete steps and into the nightclub/ These are folk who fare above us all/ Feel the music's sad and gentle fall."

The High Llamas share Drag City label space with the most currently prominent harpist, Joanna Newsom, whose musical ambition makes O'Hagan look like Joey Ramone in comparison. It's fitting, then, that Cladders' penultimate track is the playful singalong "Rollin'", on which O'Hagan, no longer content to stand back and observe his surroundings, steps into his own canvas and simply says "Hi" to the landscape himself. For an artist who often finds himself overthinking his craft, it's definitely a refreshing diversion.