Pram / Motes (live at The Cube)

Bristol
4 June 2023

Motes start things off, a two guitar and drum combo with xylophonic goodness rolled in. They don’t perform often enough, so this is a real treat.

A quiet travelogue of folding colour and shoaling shapes, sun-filled vibes that skip like rabbits across a field. The interlock is great, sounding a little like Dif Juz in places, then tangling up in noisy eruptions. The last track is a slow-scented garden where the drums are gently brushed to a chiming sunset.

After a short intermission, Pram launch straight in there, with the Great Gatsby house party that is “Shimmer And Disappear” from their most recent Across The Meridian’ release. An absolute blast, varnished in some fantastic trombone playing and a myriad of sci-fi silvering, synth action that haunts your head, unlocks your inner child with a wicked grin.

A jewel of an opener that’s closely followed by (what I think is) “Thistledown” or a reduxed version. Its seashell percussive and zombie-esque kilter seem to cement that impression with me anyway. The addition of Nightingales’ drummer Fliss Kitson to the line-up thunders through, her drums (tucked deep back in the darkness of the stage) are meaty, rhythmically imaginative, and they gift Pram’s unusual canvas with a monster-like footfall, her head rag-dolling the bounce as Sam Owen’s fragile vocals tiptoe through.

From now on, new material floods in, a macabre carnival that somnambulistically sways, a theremin-fuelled interweave of flute, clarinet guitar and silky synth. Pram’s musical elves were on fine form, injecting this fine summer’s evening with their own special brand of skewered cuteness. Everyone here loves it, each track resulting in massive applause.

Their colours leap in a flickering glitterati of nostalgic dust that thoroughly gels with the fairytale of images projected behind them. It’s as much a visual feast as a musical one, as flaming pianos, and strange blurry bodies (like the cover of Dark Island) bob around to oscillating shivers, their hessian-cloaked eyes blinking with the otherworldly lilt of the music.

A Prospero-esque backdrop weaving in lush multiples as silhouetted figures snake on through, march up a hill to burn something at the stake. Each track burns in so many directions, illuminates in light-footed fantasy, ghostly flourishes that seem to hang on that projected orb hovering that sleeping girl’s mouth.

As well as taking on the percussive reins, Fliss provides extra vocal riches on a few tracks, even duetting with Sam at one point, purring out hiccups of abstraction, a unison of harmonics that melt into actual lyrics. Arresting prose that I scribbled down, but my spidery scrawl turns out to be totally unreadable.

Suddenly the theremin player goes solo to a montage of on-screen fingers; he oozes out a rich cacophony of looped spookiness, occasionally throwing his hand beyond its magnetic field to create some lovely sharp barbs of interference. Later on he swaps wares in favour of two tiny stylophones whose raspy lo-fi goodness robotically wash across tremoring guitars.

This is fab, curling symphonics that lullatone, flap moth-like to be roasted on angst-ridden insistence then butterfly back like a lark floating the thermals. A sneak peek inside another great Pram album in the making, and hopefully released very soon (fingers crossed).

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-