Neil MCCORMICK and Chris & Rosie
The Liverpool rockers’ tenth album has all the fun of the fair – even if it’s stuck in an imagined past.
All aboard the ghost train. Roll up, roll up, for candy-floss at the penny arcade; strange illusions glimpsed in halls of mirrors; fleeting visions of half-remembered, half-imagined childhood dreams, caught in a whirling welter of jangly guitars, Farfisa organs, railroad rhythms and echo-drenched solos.
Such is the setting for Coral Island, the 10th offering from the unrepentantly oldfashioned Merseyside rockers The Coral. Across
Carnivalesque: Coral Island is a mix of retro pop songs, woozy soundscapes and spoken-word interludes 24 tracks of an ambitious double concept-album, the quintet cast themselves as the house band at an imaginary fairground. In a mix of harmony-infused retro pop songs, woozy soundscapes, and wry spoken-word interludes by the 85-year-old grandfather of band members James and Ian Skelly, The Coral conjure soundtracks for fantasy amusement rides and serenade star-crossed lovers canoodling in the shadows of the coconut shy. The band are having fun, and it shows in a carnivalesque cornucopia of strange delights – even if it never quite escapes its contrivances.
Like many Liverpool guitar bands who owe a debt to The Beatles, The Coral have always been steeped in nostalgia. When they emerged in the early 2000s, they seemed like the urchin offspring of Britpop, yet their more obvious influences reached back to the 1960s groups that had inspired Oasis and Blur. Twenty years on, they are still in thrall to the giddy early rock ’n’ roll production values of Joe Meek that overloads on treble and drenches everything in echo. Change Your Mind evokes the folky electric jangle of The Byrds, Mist on the River touches the jazzy lushness of the Zombies, Vacancy marries Nuggets-era garage rock to the nervous energy of Gene Pitney while the majestic Land of the Lost pitches for the grand melodrama of Roy Orbison.
All five band members contribute in various permutations to the deft songwriting and offer up at least one lead vocal turn, though the spotlight most often falls on guitarist James Skelly. His appealing voice broaches the soul-pop tones of Steve Marriott of The Small Faces, while his pithily observed melodic songcraft owes a large debt to Ray Davies of The Kinks, noticeably on the bittersweet Autumn Has Come and the acoustic reminiscence Old Photographs.
But while The Kinks’ conceptual adventures were at the cutting edge of multimedia rock in 1968, everything about Coral Island is stuck in an imagined past. James Skelly was born in 1980, when the world he and his bandmates obsess over was a fading memory. Carnival freak-show imagery and references to Buster Keaton and Perry Como seem bafflingly out of context now, as if The Coral were merely nostalgic for nostalgia itself. Their ambitious double may aspire to the eclecticism of The Beatles’ White Album, but it remains resolutely, if sweetly, sepia-toned.
Like many Liverpool bands who owe a debt to The Beatles, The Coral are steeped in nostalgia
ALSO OUT
Royal Blood: Typhoons (Warner)
Birdy: Young Heart (Atlantic) Del Amitri: Fatal Mistakes (Cooking Vinyl) Marianne Faithfull & Warren Ellis: She Walks in Beauty (BMG)