Review Summary: He came home.
This is a collaborative work between Conmaniac, TheSpaceMan and Fripp - in order of paragraph.
Exploring
Dark Island can quite naturally be compared to entering an abandoned home in the middle of the desert. Upon walking in, there’s an eerie sense of obscurity; lights that seemingly flitter on and off temporarily illuminate the unsettled dust and smoke within the air. Yet, it’s intimidatingly enticing, with “Track of the Cat” establishing the sultry psych-meets-gaze mood, only further coercing its listener into the structure’s dimly lit depths. Musically, a lot of the accompanying instruments in this track hint at the house’s location as the whistling that comes in around the 3-minute mark is strangely reminiscent of a Clint Eastwood film. Both the deeply rich guitar riff and the southwestern trumpet that follows help confirm this wild west setting. For an album named after something so tropical this feels a bit confusing, but that seems to be the point as Pram offers no explanation for the multiple layers of slow, patient instrumentation during its first few tracks. In fact, the guitars bounce in tone seemingly at will, beginning with a distant, soft dream pop glow that swirls into psychedelia and shoegaze, only to eventually end on a clean tone reminiscent of (dare I say) math rock during ‘Paper Hats’. Sparse, jazzy drums sporadically poke their way into the mix, making their entrances impactful due to the tight musicianship and varying percussive tools. It’s this disorientation that ends up becoming the house’s biggest lure, and so you continue on, albeit slightly perturbed, in the hopes of discovering exactly what this dwelling has to offer.
The imagery of
Dark Island paints a ghost town at nightfall. But you may acknowledge horror metaphors are trite; it has been exhausted on Pram alone, beyond the scope of it being an apt comparison to so much music out there. And thankfully with the burden of competition in mind, we are provided with a striking feature in the form of Rosie Cuckston. She confidently stands in the spotlight with her enchanting voice, and resembles a distinctly humanoid spirit in the maelstrom of darkness. She becomes the most relatable essence of Pram’s spectacle, bringing an oddly charming element through her sadistically whimsical singing. Although a figure of guidance, she doesn't offer a hand through the initial confusion, at least not until the opening instrumental track exhausts itself. It leaves you unknowingly desperate for her presence by the point of her arrival, and so you find yourself blindly following the seductress further down the corridors and catacombs of the record. As you follow, each track number is no less than a room number on the doors you pass by. In fact,
Dark Island couldn’t be more accurate a name for a record so grisly. Song after song there is the formation of a twisted and depressed archipelago chain, the
Dead Islands. Each island shares the expected similarities of her sisters but holds life respective only to its isolated shores. It's fitting that the pseudo title track is focused on a pulsating start/stop melody, perhaps driving this point further. The intermittent silence may last for a fraction of a second, but represents entire oceans between.
But what do we expect from what Pram has presented to us？ Throughout the ghastly journey
Dark Island had forced its participants upon, the allure of the film noir-meets-spaghetti western juxtaposition had yet to wear off, permeating the very fabric of the ten distinctly ghoulish songs within; each and every one of them all the more otherworldly, more distant, more horrific, and moreso calculated when inspected closely. Descriptors hardly give away what lies within the tour Pram entices you to, but nothing could possibly prepare you for what lies ahead - for better or worse. The exotica of songs such as “Sirocco,” “The Pawnbroker,” or the kitsch insanity of “The Archivist” perfectly compliment ghastly downbeat gloom tunes such as “Goodbye” or the mysterious closer “Distant Islands.”
Dark Island has a little bit of everything for everyone in its grand array of sounds that evoke thoughts of old, grainy film noir and terrifying haunted houses; of a seductive, yet unknown temptress, or of the fog hanging over the landscape in the vaguest of vague darkness.
