As an ode to a marriage of sound and cinema that evokes both set and setting, the members of Movietone have their work cut out for them. This is evident, perhaps, in the three-year lag-time between the release of 1998's Day and Night and the band's latest release, The Blossom Filled Streets.

Rooted deeply in the British port-town of Bristol, this collective is an outgrowth of the aesthetic fashioned by like-minded Bristolians Third Eye Foundation, Crescent, and Flying Saucer Attack. Formed by Rachel Brook after leaving the latter group, Movietone has subtly concreted the quiet atmospherics of her former band into something altogether provincial: a distinctly British folk-jazz persuasion.

On The Blossom Filled Streets, Movietone have expanded their instrumental palette without actually revolutionizing their sound. The intricate interplay of "cubist bass," "gulcello," and "prepared piano" adds nuances to songs otherwise distinguished by their fateful crescendos. More often than not, the band relies upon stirringly amorphous composition and the near-silent vocals of Kate Wright to guide the listener through a soporific acoustic haze true to the fog that looms so heavily upon the British landscape. Their nearest musical corollary lies with late-era Soft Machine or, perhaps more accurately, the whimsical folksiness of Robert Wyatt's contemplative late-'70s solo work.

A crucial shortsightedness lends The Blossom Filled Streets a hushed parochial reverence, expressed in the passionate rendering of the local Bristolian aura. Songs like "Hydra," "1930's Beach House," "Seagulls/Bass," and "In a Marine Light" use the group's grasp of their hometown's natural dynamics to their advantage, crafting a nearly spiritual ode to the slow establishment of localized mood. The record's wistfulness makes it tempting to assign it the tag of ephemeral, semi-transparent post-rock, but that would do the band an injustice. Movietone channel the tentative relation between memory and sensory stimuli, with a forward-looking nostalgia coming to the forefront as the ebb and flow of reality recedes into the background.

What remains is a rich investment of feeling in a musical picture of present-as-past, a grocery list of melancholically reminiscent thank-yous to a person you'll wake up next to in the morning. That there isn't a hand-cranked cinematoscope to accompany this record is perfectly pardonable.

-S. Murray