Searching for inner-scouseness has not been fashionable for a long time. Thrown aside for the Saturday night jerks and exertions to House and ignored by the thrall of UK Garage, Liverpool has not looked inwards since tank tops and Panini stickers. Fair enough really, as all background noise for adolescents should be played out to match the times and not hark back to a previous incarnation of pop’s past, especially not to an era when we have to consider our own parents running around in wild teenage abandon. Electronica is the precursor for any group now, whether it is the click track or drum loop behind the song even the most conventional of music practitioners incorporate something of the new.
So why The Coral? Best explained in psychedelic terms with the band’s stop-start time signatures, sensually confused lyrics and smoky SF bay atmosphere, actions like that were thought to have been eradicated on the Mersey by the late-eighties own love panacea of acid-house.
A stupid dismissal if ever there was one, for there is a direct connection between confused mods swallowing acid and discovering ‘Other Realms’ and The Coral washed up on the ecstasy shore. Where the Happy Mondays took House and the Hacienda and made a lifestyle a record, The Coral is descended from the initial ecstasy furor; the album is the smoked comedown from the night before. The clutching of strangers till the early hours and exclamations of ‘everything’s gonna be alright,’ is replaced by mulling over what you are the next day. The fantastic voyage leaves the user in a disordered state; it just took something else to get them there.
James Kelly and his Mother’s of Invention are no older than twenty-one and as part of the generation too young to club but young enough to know what older brothers were necking at Cream, The Coral shows the impact of a decade of superstar DJs on those growing up and it is closer to Haight-Ashbury than we thought. Spanish Main is two minutes of blues stomp inhaled through a Turkish balaclava, a psychotic reaction round a hookah pipe, while Dreaming Of You is glad abandon in thrall to the mystery muse Hendrix and Lennon were obsessed by but never met, complete yearning pop.
The shared experience of clubbing is akin to the shared experience of the cosmic giggle and here is the similarity that has The Coral sound like but not imitate the last real leisure-time upheaval of Ken Kesey and his sugar coated pills. Where The Coral find inspiration for action is in the after-effect of an evening and not the sheer confusion of what you’re on that night. Take Skeleton Key in its Zappaesque disarray, it would be easy to see it through a purple haze and, yes, the haze looks and sounds the same but the journey here is altogether different. The blurred take on verse/chorus and the edited feel of the track although it is played as one tune comes from the shakiness of the day after and the uncertainty of knowing what has just happened here and things aren’t entirely clear.
On Calenders And Clocks when James sings ‘Descendants of joy/Return the father to the boy,’ the dislocation and hipness of The Coral is distilled from ‘Rolling another one,’ though not out of the pocket of the Sixties. For a new millennium there has been a new and decade long party and The Coral is the sound of people getting their heads together afterwards. The ten year long extravaganza that has shaken these Scousers so much to the core strikes familiar to the intensity of the acid, which blew many people off course, and here the similarity ends. As a debut this is not a hangover due to previous success, this is coming to terms with being so high so young. An insane and coming together experience.