Pram
The Museum of Imaginary Animals
[Merge]
Rating: 7.7
As a child, I often found myself terrified of effigies in the dark. I wasn't
afraid of the dark itself, it's just that I couldn't bear having the lights
turned out and witnessing an ominous residual glow imbue my stuffed animals
with a sinister impression of life. I got rid of my E.T. poster because
it looked absolutely horrific in the moonlight.
It seems as though Pram's entire recorded career has focused on this childhood
fear, characterized mainly by an otherworldly eclecticism in approach and an
alien tentativeness in execution. And Pram's ballooning number of band members
has articulated their work's quirky effervescence over the years. The opener
on this, their fifth album, is titled "The Owl Service" after a children's
horror story by Alan Garner. Pram courts the actively uncanny with a delicate
balance of childlike irreverence and apprehension.
The Museum of Imaginary Animals frames Rosie Cuckston's schoolgirl vocals
within an intricately homespun dream jazz symphony. Less sparse than their
previous releases, the flute, clarinet, and trumpet contributions are more
pronounced, and the songs are stylistically denser. "The Owl Service" is
almost funky in its avant-jazz-pop amblings, while "Bewitched" bludgeons the
conventional pop song, blossoming into a shadowy anti-anthem while Cuckston
subversively intones: "From certain corners where I used to hide/ I could act
as a satellite spying on my own life/ Decode the message in the space between
the words." The greater instrumental dexterity runs the risk of overwhelming
Cuckston's Moe Tucker-by-way-of-Britain vocal capacity, but her voice remains
Pram's secret weapon. In the swoops of her delivery, and her cracked straining
for high notes, one finds a detached expression of the vaguely fascinated in
the face of the surreal.
One of the first Too Pure signings, Pram was, in many respects, the first
Broadcast, offering a distinct take on the French-pop core manifest in early
Stereolab. Both Pram and Broadcast hail from Birmingham, and the drummer on
this album even drummed for an earlier incarnation of Broadcast. But what
distinguishes the two is that Pram continues to showcase the foggy insular
quality of their work while Broadcast has buffed its approach to a glossily
synthetic sheen. Pram remains caught up in a loosely crafted fairy tale of
its own making, a musical Brother's Grimm hell-bent on examining the puzzlebox
of a child's dark imagination.
-S. Murray