
THE HIGH LLAMAS
Hey Panda (Drag City)
Just think: there are probably still people longing for High Llamas mainman Sean O’Hagan to return to the swooning pop loveliness of 1994 album Gideon Gaye. Don’t be one of them: while that record’s undoubtedly an agrarian Beach Boys-indebted masterpiece, O’Hagan has long been exploring tributaries of electronica, soul, musicals and all other shiny things, and Hey Panda refracts all this with prismatic brilliance. It’s a collection of song doodles encrusted with thousands of little jewels, tiny noises that are warped and scattered then disappear forever.
The precision is playful: see the buried sheep baas on Fall Off The Mountain, or the four-note string motif that appears once only on Sisters Friends (which itself sounds like Fiery Furnaces). Will Oldham gets autotuned amongst trap beats for two avant-soul songs. And O’Hagan’s melodies rotate, distort and get echoed by his grownup daughter Livvy, embedded in this weird, clean, modern wonder of an album. Brilliant, in all senses of the word.
words WILL STEEN