Pram
Dark Island
Merge (US) / Domino (UK)

Over the course of a decadelong, six-album career, Pram has pursued its own offbeat agenda, shunning public appearances and photographs, occasionally playing at a handful of small venues, never opening for anyone famous and generally keeping a low profile. Despite having once been a labelmate of Stereolab, PJ Harvey and Th' Faith Healers and having sown the seeds for the sound that netted Broadcast a spot on the Austin Powers soundtrack, the group has never gotten its due.

Even though the band has never busted onto CMJ's flawed college radio playlists, Pram is one of those rare, instantly recognizable acts: If you've heard and liked any of its records, you need only hear about a 10-second snippet of any of its other work to name the artist.

Yet Pram is anything but static and predictable. Compare its latest album, Dark Island, with its first, The Stars are So Big, the Earth is so Small ... Stay as You Are. You'll hear a progression from a rough-around-the-edges rock band influenced heavily by Can and the Velvet Underground (especially "Murder Mystery") to a polished jazz combo that dabbles in exotica, space-age pop and bossa nova while retaining its original rock roots. Despite its myriad influences and stylistic shifts — which even included a reggae number back on 1997's Music for Your Movies EP — Pram continues to sound only like Pram.

The group has always distinguished itself from its peers and followers — the best known of which are Stereolab (peer) and Broadcast (follower) — via its ample toybox of eclectic instruments. Trumpet, clarinet, flute, accordion, glockenspiel, maracas, zither, a Hawaiian bubble machine and keyboards and guitars too numerous to name or classify have all done time on Pram albums. What's more, Pram is one of the few rock bands that can boast a member who actually plays the theremin, as opposed to cluelessly waving his hands around to create kee-razy sounds for the kids.

Distinguishing characteristics aside, Dark Island is the closest thing Pram has to a "David Lynch album": Four of its songs closely resemble the downtempo, jazz-tinged lounge that frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti put together for "Twin Peaks." A crashing guitar that shows up in "Penny Arcade" and "Track of the Cat," sounds like Pram could've picked it up after it fell off the back of Badalamenti's van.

Lyrically, Pram chanteuse Rosie Cuckston takes her cues from a fairy-tale world where a king would lock his daughter away in a tower to keep out suitors, or an evil witch would send a beautiful young girl a poison apple. But Cuckston's lyrics aren't cut from the same cloth as Mary Timony's lame-ass Dungeons & Dragons tales of sorcerers and witches. Pram inhabits the world on the other side of Lewis Carroll's looking glass, where people's shadows have their own personalities and motives are slightly askew, as evidenced in "The Pawnbroker":

As winter bleached the color from the sun you left the in-laws/ And went to buy the things that I'd put in the pawnshop window/ You took them home, locked them away/ My heart and soul, like china on display

I realized my mistake and hurried to the pawnshop window/ But where my things had been there was nothing but a shadow/ And I became yours as you held the key/ My heart and soul no longer belong to me

So now I wash the blood out of the uniforms you wear/ And stitch and mend your life up wherever there's a tear/ I repay the debt, so one day you'll owe me/ And on a night you'll regret, you will hand over the key

Though people in the real world don't act this way, there's a familiar relation between "The Pawnbroker" and the fairy tales we learned as children.

Pram, however, doesn't stop at the Brothers Grimm. The aptly named instrumental "Sirocco," a Middle Eastern snake charmer's anthem complete with rattling maracas, takes its cue from "Arabian Nights." "Leeward" is the perfect soundtrack to a night at sea.

Yet Dark Island makes its mark with its opening track, "Track of the Cat," wherein a one-of-a-kind beat punctuated by a timpani pairs with the theremin and the usual Pram array of exotic keyboards. (Five of Pram's seven members are credited with keyboards on this album, though no one is credited with just keyboards — these guys do it all.) The four-minute song takes a breather halfway through before what sounds like mechanical respiration is abruptly undercut by spy-movie guitar and trumpet heralding the return of the song's primary melody.

At a time when everyone's looking for the next big thing, it's refreshing to check in with a decade-old band that's continued to expand and inhabit its own little world, pushing things forward while sounding only like itself. Pram will never have a gold record, be criticized for leading our youth astray, have a hit song in a major motion picture, appear in a fun VW advertisement or even be nominated for the Shortlist Award. Pram just quietly makes one great record after another.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)