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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary
Pram twisted the old craft of progressive-rock to the point that it became a container for all sorts of odd structures. Rosie Cuckston's childish vocals inhabited a wonderland painted by the surreal colors of Max Simpson's samples and keyboards, plus the occasional trumpet or saxophone, and was constantly challenged by the grotesque charge of a power-trio ignited by Matthew Eaton's guitar. Elements of jazz, dub and electronica permeated The Stars Are So Big The Earth Is So Small (1993), thus it was not surprising that Helium (1994) sounded like Daevid Allen's Gong playing trip-hop. Its creative chaos had few rivals in those years. Despite the number and density of sonic events, the loose structures of Sargasso Sea (1995) sounded like pure abstractions, mirages, phantasms, and eventually led (on a more earthly plane) to the exquisite muzak of North Pole Radio Station (1998) and Museum Of Imaginary Animals (2000).
Full bio
Pram are a band from Leeds (England) that rediscovered the glorious tradition
of British progressive-rock adding the casual and rebellious posture of the
punk generation.
Vocalist Rosie Cuckston, bassist Sam Owen,
guitarist Matthew Eaton, drummer Darren Garrett and sampler Max Simpson
make up a combo worthy of avantgarde and jazz music.
They progressively ventured into dissonance, dub and electronica.
The mini-album
Gash (Howl, 1990) is still a transitional work, centered around the
plainest female vocals and unorthodox arrangements, that displays a
bizarre attitude towards downplaying music, to the point that
Dead Piano, an amateurish, noisy Captain Beefheart-esque blues,
seems to be played on toy instruments.
Flesh weds Art Bears' austere progressive-rock and the frantic drumming
of Teenage Jesus.
The first "regular" song, I'm A War, is whispered a` la Francoise Hardy
over a chaotic beat.
More surreal confessions surface in Inmate's Clothes, an
angelic madrigal over African percussion, and
Pram, a lullaby hummed against a drum-machine and organ drones.
The gap between the singer and the band wides with Dirty Children,
where the voice hardly sings whereas the band indulges in a loud,
chaotic bacchanal.
The CD reissue of Gash (Howl, 1997) includes the
instrumental Sunset International, a sinister variation on
"kosmische musik", and a few tracks taken from the
cassette Perambulations (Howl, 1995).
The lengthy Blue Singer is a post-modernist deconstruction of blues
cliches, from the harmonica wails to the
repetition of elementary guitar phrases.
The Day The Animals Turned On The Cars is a mockery of
Satie's piano music.
Bleed betrays the influence of kraut-rock.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
The EP Iron Lung (Too Pure, 1992) expands harmonic horizons: Iron Lung explores menacing rhythmic paths, Water Toy plays with ambient dub, and Cumulus toys with a jaw harp.
Perhaps also thanks to the addition of trumpet and saxophone, the album The Stars Are So Big The Earth Is So Small (Too Pure, 1993) makes a prodigious leap in quality: torrential tracks like In Dreams You Too Can Fly recall both Can and Miles Davis in search of impossible harmonies. The breathtaking crescendo of Radio Freak In A Storm is not overwhelming, but simply elegant.
Helium (Too Pure, 1994) regresses toward a more friendly sound, partly thanks to the vocalist’s growing abilities and partly due to more linear instrumental arrangements. Although a natural digression from the previous work, the album seems to purr along with the two intellectual trends of the moment, trip-hop and Stereolab. Foregrounded are compromise songs such as Gravity (feeble chorus, galloping drums, organ spiraling in a carnival-like ring) and My Father The Clown (circus um-pa-pa, cabaret melody).
In reality, highly elaborate tracks like Dancing On A Star overflow with sprite-like synthesizers, rhythmic oddities, and bursts of free jazz. The compositions arise from improbable—if not outright sacrilegious—juxtapositions: a mix of Pere Ubu and a Parisian chansonnier for Nightwatch, a Broadway musical aria at a trot for Things Left On The Pavement. The group’s polychromatic imagination knows no bounds, from the long bebop jam Blue, through an instrumental of sonic allusions like Meshes In The Afternoon, to the extremes of harmonic eccentricity in Shadows. The most surreal cacophonies become part of the acrobats’ repertoire, led by Schonberg himself.
The Pram continue beautifully a tradition that began twenty years earlier with the tentative improvisations of King Crimson and passed through the lysergic deliriums of Mandragora.
Sargasso Sea (Too Pure, 1995) is even more jazz-influenced, but also more concise, as if the group wanted to strip away unnecessary frills and focus on the core material. This results in compositions like Loose Threads, which represent the state of the art in progressive rock: a revisitation of noir atmospheres guided by minimalism and the disheveled style of college-pop.
Sea Swells And Distant Squalls evokes the atmosphere of a psychoanalytic nightmare with its metronomic repetition of sound events (dull gong strikes, a sprinkle of trinkets, dreamlike reverbs, electronic streamers). The tangled metamorphoses of Cotton Candy end up creating a magical hypnosis, reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The avant-garde lied invented by Henry Cow and Art Bears collapses, emptied of Brechtian emphasis, in Serpentine, and self-destructs in the trumpet fanfare that closes Three Wild Georges.
The harmonies seem to vanish on tiptoe, thinning gradually into the pure sonic abstraction of Little Sears, the instrumental music box of Crystal Tips, an orchestral muzak for lunar gardens—diaphanous, amorphous, funereal.
Indefinable rhythms, unfinished melodies, murmuring trumpets, loosely connected passages… the harmonious disorder of the human soul as it observes an autumnal landscape through a fogged window.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
A lighter, kinder Pram surfaced with the EP
Music For Your Movies (Duophonic, 1997), equally interested in
scoring polite madrigals
(Sea Jungle, Silver Nitrate) and in improvising hypnotic dub jams
(Carnival Of Souls).
The single Omnicord (Wurlitzer Jukebox, 1998) made the best of this
new course, thanks to an almost mocking blend of
Stereolab and Duan Eddy,
while with the single
Last Astronauts (Kooky, 1998) the band reached again the peaks of their
jazz inspiration.
The album North Pole Radio Station (Wurlitzer Jukebox, 1998) builds on
that new style, that largely reneges on the original amateutish approach
and endorses a more professional stance.
While nothing matches the naive beauty of the singles, Pram concocts moments of
exquisite muzak that draws from both Nino Rota (Cinnabar) and
Ennio Morricone (El Topo), surrealistic experiments worthy of Varese
(Bathesphere), Messaien
(The Clockwork Lighthouse, a mini-concerto for
drum machine, trumpet, tuba, xylophone, piano, percussion)
and Stockhausen (the electronic black hole of Cow Ghosts).
It is a sign of the times, though, that
instrumental tracks prevail over vocal tracks.
The sweaty blues-reggae ballad Sleepy Sweaty and
the accordion-tinged bossanova pop of Fallen Snow match in spirit
the easy-listening program of the singles, but they pale compared with
Pram's original program.
The dance remix of Sleepy Sweaty and the single
Space Siren (Domino, 1999) continue Pram's flirt with trendy dance styles.
Telemetric Melodies (Domino, 1999) is an anthology of the last
singles and some remixed tracks that, again, aims for the discos.
Museum Of Imaginary Animals (Domino, 2000)
indulges a little too long in stylistic experiments for the sake of eccentricity. Countless ideas are employed and layered in The Owl Service, Bewitched, Mother Of Pearl, Cat's Cradle, but these songs look like what they are: parades of ideas for songs. Play Of The Waves is the one that best recalls the original soft, progressive, dreamy sound. Vocalist Rosie Cuxton shines in The Mermaid's Hotel.
The EP Somniloquy (Merge, 2001) offers four new tracks and five remixes.
Another EP, Owl Service (Domino, 2002), preceded the new album.
Dark Island (Domino, 2003) finds an unlikely balance between
Robert Wyatt and Stereolab:
the "Miles Davis meets Ennio Morricone jazz" of the instrumental Track Of The Cat,
the hybrid of Jon Hassell and Monteverdi of the ethereal ballad Penny Arcade,
the soulful fanfare of Paper Hats,
the cubist carousels of Leeward and The Archivist that slowly
disintegrate their leitmotifs,
the retro`-kitsch of Peepshow,
etc.
Monade's A Few Steps More (Too Pure, 2005) documents
a collaboration between Pram's Rosie Cuckston and Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier.
While the class and the musicianship are undeniable, and the variety of styles
is overwhelming,
The Moving Frontier (2007) tends to be too much routine and too little
genius.
Rosie Cuckston quit the band in 2008 and a new vocalist was featured
a decade later on Across the Meridian (2018).
Sam Owen and Max Simpson also play in the Moths of the Moon that released the
EP Another Place (2021).
Pram returned with
Across the Meridian
(2018).
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