Album: Pram

Dark Island, Domino

Their previous Domino albums North Pole Radio Station and Museum of Imaginary Animals established Birmingham's Pram as doughty pop experimentalists in the vein of Stereolab or Talk Talk; indeed, they could be mistaken for part of the Thrill Jockey roster, if it weren't for their ability to stop listeners falling into the deepest of slumbers. Dark Island may be their best offering yet, with evocative instrumentals like the camel-gaited desert blues "Sirocco" and haunted-house creep "Peepshow" punctuating songs whose blend of ingenue vocals and tricksy art-pop textures recalls Seventies oddball trio Slapp Happy. The opening piece "Track of the Cat", a piquant loungecore exercise, illustrates the diversity of their instrumental palette, with a backdrop of bongoes, wind noise and wistful ocarina-tone organ supporting grand, enigmatic guitar twangs and bursts of Morricone-sque mariachi trumpet. Elsewhere, clarinet, violin, theremin, flute and xylophone are blended in various engrossing combinations in songs dealing with abstract matters like dreams, love, memory and semantics. "I hesitate to say what I mean, as my mind is full of doubt," sings lyricist Rosie Cuckston in "Distant Islands". Cerebral rather than emotional, her songs gnaw away obsessively at the problematic spaces between things, with "Archivist" fretting over the way imperfect memories erode one's character. Recommended.