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Cold and Bouncy
 
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Cold and Bouncy [Import]

~ High Llamas
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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8 used from £2.49 1 collectible from £6.79

Product details

  • Audio CD (27 Jan 1998)
  • Number of Discs: 1
  • Format: Import
  • Label: V2 (Wasabi)
  • ASIN: B000004BSB
  • Other Editions: Audio CD  |  Vinyl
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 705,224 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Track Listings

1. Twisto Teck
2. Sun Beats Down
3. HiBall Nova Scotia
4. Tilting Windmills
5. Glide Time
6. Bouncy Glimmer
7. Three Point Scrabble
8. Homespin Rerun
9. Painters Paint
10. Evergreen Vampo
11. Showstop Hip Hop
12. Over the River
13. End on Tick Tock
14. Didball
15. Jazzed Carpenter
16. Lobby Bears

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mixing ambitious melodies, lush strings, and wistful European influences with a cynical lyricism worthy of Steely Dan, The High Llamas third album proves that head Llama Sean O'Hagan is one of Britain's most competent purveyors of experimental pop music. An obvious single, "The Sun Beats Down" cleverly redefines easy listening; its deliberately syrupy arrangement is replete with a giddy undercurrent of bouncing electronica. Melodically reminiscent of the Beach Boys, much of Cold And Bouncy displays O'Hagan's gift for the kind of string arrangements that have led him to form a fruitful long term collaborative relationship with the equally cerebral Stereolab. Often accused of being all surface and no feeling, The High Llamas' Cold And Bouncy occasionally falls easy prey to one too many instrumental passages and repetitive melodies. Its lack of obvious mainstream appeal--aside from tracks like "Glide Time" and "Painters Paint"--are the sound of Debussy composing muzak for lifts. --James Littlewood

From Amazon.com
Since the High Llamas first arrived on these shores with 1995's Gideon Gaye (the band actually dates back to 1990), the London-by-way-of-Ireland quintet has worked tirelessly toward crafting increasingly elaborate versions of the same album--an album that isn't even theirs to begin with. While single-minded devotion is commendable, head Llama Sean O'Hagen's obsession with realizing the pop ideal promised by Smile (the aborted "teenage symphony to God" attempted by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in the late '60s) now verges on a folly that's leading him to a hopeless (though admittedly blissful) oblivion.

Gideon Gaye presented a limited but highly successful attempt at an Irish-flavored Smile, while 1997's Hawaii offered a sprawling, blatantly derivative take on Wilson and Parks's mix of rustic Americana and orchestral pop. Now with Cold and Bouncy, O'Hagen incorporates Smile's banjos, harpsichords, organs, strings, and horn arrangements with a healthy dose of the electronic percolations he picked up from his work on last year's Stereolab album, Dots and Loops.

As the High Llamas get more ambitious, what they achieve is analogous to a computer enlargement of a sharp and colorful photograph: The boundaries stretch and the vision expands, but the material itself becomes increasingly flat and diffuse. Where pop elements are often handy in making more challenging music accessible, O'Hagen's attempt to expand pop's ambitions has yet to produce conclusive results.

Like past albums, Cold And Bouncy intersperses supermelodic vocal constructions between lush instrumentals for a series of pleasant but largely indistinguishable compositions. On a track like "Showstop Hip Hop," the computerized bleeps and blurps add a significant new texture which lends a wonderful sort of "dub pop" sound to the extended introduction. Once the song breaks into the verse, however, it surfs good vibrations all the way and washes out with the rest of the album. While the High Llamas search for the outer orbits of pop, it seems more and more like the group long ago exceeded the genre's limits and unknowingly floated off into space. --Roni Sarig

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Just My Feeling, 21 May 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Cold and Bouncy (Audio CD)
Cold and Bouncy is an accurate description of the High Llamas' music, in many ways. On the surface, it's light and airy, with sprightly or sighing melodies, sometimes quite detailed, but that very attention to detail keeps the music at an emotional distance ¡X it's easy to admire Sean O'Hagan's skill, but a little more difficult to be moved by it. Still, there's a lot to be said for being evocative, which the High Llamas certainly are. Like its predecessor Hawaii, Cold and Bouncy floats between involved instrumentals and songs, relying on texture more than actual songwriting. O'Hagan is beginning to break away from his Brian Wilson obsessions, even if echoes of Smile and Pet Sounds are evident throughout the record. However, it sounds more than ever like original work, thanks to a subtle incorporation of retro-electronic textures, straight out of his work with Stereolab. Those keyboards open the sound up just enough to make Cold and Bouncy the group's most inviting release since Gideon Gaye, but it still suffers from O'Hagan's meandering tendencies. While its not the marathon of Hawaii, the album still runs way too long, lasting well over an hour. Instead of adding depth, the length makes O'Hagan's ideas difficult to assimilate, and by the end of the record, it sounds like he only has variations on a handful of themes. But when the album is consumed in small doses, however, O'Hagan's flair for arrangement and sonic detail burns brightly.
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