Pram
Helium

Clowns are so sad... metaphysical characters that serve as a bumbling image of human failure in the frantic climb to power. Children don't laugh at their skills; they mock behind their backs their social function, knowing they will never have to become their epigones, unintentionally grasping the tragedy hidden beneath the makeup.

Pram is a little-known English group formed in the nineties and still active today. Their music is a traveling circus made of dwarfs, clowns, and fat ladies, a tent painted with sadness and disguised as a toy for the world of the happy.

Discomfort is represented by the voice of Rosie Cuckston (also on keyboards and theremin), anemic and aching, who sings to the stars in a subdued tone about the pain of a life that no longer respects those with an income under fifteen thousand euros a year.

The splendid music that supports her hides a touching musical contradiction. Indeed, the sound arises from the tradition of music-hall and vaudeville, from the comic-satirical operettas of the thirties, and from the variety show, but it is not merely derivative. On the contrary, it reverses their meaning, no longer entertaining cultured amusement but a vehicle of a profound sense of inadequacy in the modern world.

One could say that just as new-wave artists expressed the status of anxiety and alienation in industrial society, Pram did the same with the reality of the nineties and two-thousands, that of reality shows and TV formats, where the individual is valued and accomplished only if known or famous, recognized in the eyes of many, inserted into a social context that allows them to be greeted and glorified in the streets or other places of gathering.

We find ourselves dancing with a black tear painted on our cheeks, among colorful balloons flying supported by psychedelic, alienating, and fleeting keyboard touches, among the pins of a hypnotic, inspired acrobatic synth (thank you, Ravenstine), on the pyrotechnic, delicate, and nonstop rolls of percussions that roll and sway in the brain between one ear and the other, on trapezes raised by a balancing bass, among the poles suspended in the air by an elusive and graceful guitar, amidst the harmless flames of a sax, the tinkling of a triangle, and the vibrations of a little bell.

It's a truly unique and uncategorizable, fluid and elegant, sweet and refined album, which seeks no spikes or surprises but rather an overall identity; an album composed of circular melodies and a dense soundscape that among its folds reveals fragments of the gothic enthusiasm of Nico (My Father The Clown, a poetic masterpiece), the psychedelic ups and downs of the Doors (the urgent Gravity), the synthetic seizures of Pere Ubu (Dancing On A Star and Little Angel, Little Monkey), the elegance of the nocturnal jazz-rock of Gong (Blue), and the cerebralisms of the avant-garde of Philip Glass (Shadows).

It's a work that has all the right elements to be lively and cheerful but results instead immeasurably sad and misunderstood, magical but sick.
There is no cry for help, just inert resignation to confinement in the undeserved state of failure.

"Helium" is a clown with a degree, alone in front of the mirror in his dressing room, intent on removing his makeup with the bitterness and awareness that what will be revealed to the world's eyes is not so different from his own mask.

...The Show Must Go On...

Profound!