Museum Of Imaginery Animals

Somewhere in between Stereolab and Broadcast, you have Pram, merrily measuring out their own insignificance in light-years, even more fascinated by life as it exists on our odd planet because of its pathetic tininess.

Museum’s pawnshop-window-ful of jostling instrumentation (flute! accordion! zither!!) humanises the sci-fi elementals here, and also raises the swinging-grooviness ante, as in the creeping Jungle Book funkiness of ‘The Owl Service’. The sunny, brainy, very British eccentricity that results puts one in mind, happily, of a slightly spidery Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

Meanwhile, main Pram-pusher Rosie Cuckston comes on like the female Euros Childs: a 10-year-old nervously piping her way through the lead role in a pageant about Planet Earth.

Charming, flighty and mysterious in the way that children are, Museum Of Imaginary Animals suggests that, in addition to their yen for physics and astronomy, Pram are probably also the type of band who fascinatedly pulled the legs off spiders as children… As always, all in the interests of science.

Naturally.