Easy on the accolades and superlatives. Grizzily scouse skinna-ruppers, The Coral are about to NOT change history or the face of Rock n’ Roll. What they are about to do is release a very very fine EP.
Assessing the potentially plump success of scouse, pirate band, The Coral, the NME wrote:
“The best new band in the country: it’s one sentence we never tire of writing”.
And never tire they do. And let’s face it, if you predict the best band often enough, you are bound to be right at least 30% of the time, especially when everybody forgets you said exactly the same thing about Terris and Menswear. So hey, what d’y know, we have another exclusive. The emperor’s new clothes? Nah, fairytales don’t even come into it. It’s a spurious marketing ploy known as creating the demand. You have shitloads of old tat in your backyard. What do you do? You tell everybody that shitloads of old tat is exactly what they need. And the good news? You’re always going to have a plentiful supply of old tat to sell. What could be better or more resourceful? Well, if The Coral are anything to go by, old tat that is really quite good, is what.
You had better hold on to all your emperors’ new hats, because this is a band that could well live up to the hype.
Not since Gomez shuffled on to the scene in late nineties has there been such a stirring of prodigious young talent. Similarly low-key, similarly ramshackle and shambolic, similarly attired and similarly inspired, The Coral have that same fourscore and twenty years of musical talent squeezed into one clammy pair of underpants and a school bag that Gomez were lauded for at the time of ‘Bring It On’ in ’99. And what a cursed and enviable status indeed to have: you are better musicians at 18 than any one of your hectoring peers will be at 65. You have better tunes. You work live like seasoned pros. And the icing on the cake? You seriously don’t give a flying fuck. Coral frontman, James Skelly explains:
“Music has been forgotten and been replaced by attitude. I don’t care about posing. I don’t care about impressing people. I just want to impress myself”.
Skelly admits to having so little regard for radio music and airfix punk. So what does he do? He gets up and puts Harry Nilsson on his deck in the morning. They are also on record as saying that they’d rather record an album like Miles Davies ‘Kind of Blue’ or Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ than churn out pale imitations of Kurt Cobain’s puerile exit bullshit. And their attitude to the charts:
“The charts are irrelevant,” says Adam “Good music doesn’t get into the charts”.
So young and yet so wise. And on punk:
“I don’t think it’s cool not to play your instrument. It’s shit.”
Six years old and hailing from the seaside town Hoylake, some fifteen minutes out of Liverpool, the band were discovered by ex-Shack drummer Alan Wills in rehearsal. Clasping the shoulders of the band like an asylum seeker would a train-ticket, Alan promptly formed the band’s own label, Deltatronic. The band not so unpredictably went on to tour with the Charlatans and supported Oasis on their recent self-congratulatory gig at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire. 2001 saw the release of 2 eps ‘Shadows Fall’ and ‘The Oldest Path’. And if it is something we want to happen the rest will indeed be history. And with the release of the band’s third EP release, Skeleton Key on April 1st, it is going to be something we want to happen.
Happy to explore instruments that they don’t even know the name of, the record is a funky little treasure trove of angular, retro psychedelia and rasping blues. Sea-shanty title track, ‘Skeleton Key’ with it’s bawdy, rum-fuelled clamour of squealing guitars and growling harmonies and its nightmarish claustrophobia is a little fun-sized party animal with enough jiggery-poguery to keep a roomful of bandits amused for the evening.
Bendy guitars and rubber faces, the party continues with ‘Dressed Like A Cow’ — which, it might reasonably be said, enacts some boozy imagined meeting between Hendrix, The Doors and the Spoonful’s John Sebastian.
The skeleton crew of harmonies and energetic scrapes and leaps lovingly gives rise to ‘Darkness‘ — a song that melds the delicate chiming joy of Radioheads’ ‘No Surprises’ to a chorus of floating xylophones and sliding steel guitars. The trumpet and harmonica flourishes and the military snare drilling it up in the background add to the mix to provide a dreamy luscious sunset of a song.
‘Darkness’ is a midnight toker’s lullaby.
Exit track, ‘Sheriff John Brown’ is perhaps the only hole in this record’s defence with its unimaginably bizarre and dis-synchronous redneck American vocal: it’s odd, very odd indeed. Teasingly out of context and anachronistic with it’s Animals’ style Hammond and its ‘‘rising sun’ guitar lick, ‘Sheriff John Brown’ suggests a deeply intense Lovin’ Spoonful getting hot and gritty in the city. Never since Lonnie Donnegan and the Beatles has the UK music scene worn its US references on its sleeve so unashamedly. Ripping off US folklore could be perceived to be a natural enough extension of this and besides, it does little to detract from a band that takes that inspiration and crafts something solid and honest from it.
Joyriders? No. Romantic dreamers? Yes. The Coral produce songs that sound as they were written in a bus-shelter by some time travelling poet laureate who at some earlier period or other may have hooked up with Lord Byron and Jim Morrison and gone crazy in a brothel. It’s a sound that is full of ruffs and sleeves but it is equally garbed out too in Peter Pan tights, Huckleberry Finn breeches, and Edgar Allen Poe glasses.
For a band who like BMX bikes, make their own films of disjointed kung fu capers, loathe hippies more than punks, are expressive thinkers and readers of Hemmingway, The Coral possibly have more friggin’ in the riggin’ than most, and are more than a little capable of selling their idiosyncratic brand of middle-earth cartoon piracy to the world.
Are The Coral the band to watch?
No. They’re a band to listen to. And quite possibly the band to listen to.
But you didn’t hear it here first, okay?
The Coral are:
Lee Southall – Vocals/guitar
Nick Power- Organ/vocals
Paul Duffy- Bass/saxophone
Ian Skelly – Drums
James Skelly – Guitar/vocals
Bill Ryder-Jones- Guitar/trumpet
Relevant sites:
Alan Sargeant for Crud Magazine © 2002