This literally got an 11th hour reprieve. I was writing up a Notes post on the edition of John Peel's Music from 17/1/93 and for several weeks this track by Birmingham group, Pram, was not going to be included. It made the initial shortlist of selections, but further listens showed the track to be impenetrable and I was all ready to mention it as a "Falling from favour..." case. And then I went back to listen to it again, just so I could get my facts straight about why I was going to reject it, only to find that in that listen, all of a sudden, Cumulus revealed its secrets to me.
It was the final track of the 17/1/93 show and unlike some end of show tracks, which are put in purely to eat up time, this fits the final minutes like a glove. It's a beguilingly strange mix of math rock, folk, hard rock and psychedelic electronica. An intriguing but unfocused mish-mash I thought, at least until about 10 minutes ago, when I heard it as a successful fusion of what Pink Floyd would have sounded like had Syd Barrett been with them into 1969. Cumulus pulls off the trick of sounding both whimsical and futuristic. I give thanks that it showed itself to me, just as I was poised to deliver a rejection to it. I can't think of many songs which manage to conjure up the sense of Noddy in Toyland on an alien planet, but Cumulus manages it, and that is something worth celebrating.
Video courtesy of Fernando Meneses.
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