Pitchfork

As a child, I often found myself terrified of effigies in the dark. I wasn't afraid of the dark itself, it's just that I couldn't bear having the lights turned out and witnessing an ominous residual glow imbue my stuffed animals with a sinister impression of life. I got rid of my E.T. poster because it looked absolutely horrific in the moonlight.

It seems as though Pram's entire recorded career has focused on this childhood fear, characterized mainly by an otherworldly eclecticism in approach and an alien tentativeness in execution. And Pram's ballooning number of band members has articulated their work's quirky effervescence over the years. The opener on this, their fifth album, is titled "The Owl Service" after a children's horror story by Alan Garner. Pram courts the actively uncanny with a delicate balance of childlike irreverence and apprehension.

The Museum of Imaginary Animals frames Rosie Cuckston's schoolgirl vocals within an intricately homespun dream jazz symphony. Less sparse than their previous releases, the flute, clarinet, and trumpet contributions are more pronounced, and the songs are stylistically denser. "The Owl Service" is almost funky in its avant-jazz-pop amblings, while "Bewitched" bludgeons the conventional pop song, blossoming into a shadowy anti-anthem while Cuckston subversively intones: "From certain corners where I used to hide/ I could act as a satellite spying on my own life/ Decode the message in the space between the words." The greater instrumental dexterity runs the risk of overwhelming Cuckston's Moe Tucker-by-way-of-Britain vocal capacity, but her voice remains Pram's secret weapon. In the swoops of her delivery, and her cracked straining for high notes, one finds a detached expression of the vaguely fascinated in the face of the surreal.

One of the first Too Pure signings, Pram was, in many respects, the first Broadcast, offering a distinct take on the French-pop core manifest in early Stereolab. Both Pram and Broadcast hail from Birmingham, and the drummer on this album even drummed for an earlier incarnation of Broadcast. But what distinguishes the two is that Pram continues to showcase the foggy insular quality of their work while Broadcast has buffed its approach to a glossily synthetic sheen. Pram remains caught up in a loosely crafted fairy tale of its own making, a musical Brother's Grimm hell-bent on examining the puzzlebox of a child's dark imagination.