Send "THE CORAL " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Uncut |
 After emerging in 2002 with a debut that took in – as well as mind-altering substances, evidently – Love, Captain Beefheart, The La’s and sea shanties (sometimes in the space of one song), the Coral have since settled down. Having abandoned their quirky initial path to write songs based more around James Skelly’s blue-eyed soul voice, the band have made a sound decision: they want to square up with the greats, rather than be sidelined as an interesting oddity. This, their fifth album, sees them being moderately successful in their aims. The ghost of Arthur Lee drifts through the likes of “Jacqueline” and the divinely mystic “Rebecca You”, but the band’s decision to keep things on more orthodox tap seems to have been accomplished at the expense of some of their spirit....full text |
| Nme |
| First, some context. Back in 2005, Hoylake hearties The Coral were all at sea. It was all there in their third album, ‘The Invisible Invasion’. A spooked, rickety work conceived as an attempt to “bring back Jim Morrison in a pirate ship”, it was an album populated by roaming lepers and cripples, channelling the nightmarish visions of ’tache-twiddling master surrealist Salvador Dali, and bearing the mark of producers Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow, the dark presence behind long-absent UK gloom-meisters Portishead. Like giving birth to a dancing skeleton, it wasn’t easy. But this wasn’t a cynical attempt to make an album that sat in the all-time classics list; this was the sound of a band battling demons, but all the while trying to find new frontiers to explore....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| While critics have traditionally bemoaned mainstream pop music's preoccupation with teen starlets over serious songwriters, the guardians of Proper Rock Music are not immune to a similar idealization of youth. Take the Coral, who emerged in 2002 amid a torrent of UK critical hysteria that suggested any band of 20-year-olds who displayed a passing knowledge of the Captain Beefheart catalogue could be instantly lauded as the saviours of music. But as the Coral's increasingly reserved five-album catalogue has shown, the flipside of being a band that's wise beyond its years is that that band can sound a little too eager to sound like geezers. For all the spot-the-influence 1960s sources heard on the Coral's self-titled 2002 debut, there was a restless energy and surfeit of genre-blurring experimentation that liberated the material from being a mere retro exercise; even when they veered toward pastoral folk for 2003's Magic and Medicine, there was a disquieting Wicker Man aura that lent the more serene material a sinister edge. But Roots & Echoes feels locked on an AM-radio dial in 1966, when soul music and paisley pop rotated alongside one another without incident. With his early gruffness buffed away, vocalist James Skelly has settled into a comfort zone somewhere between Love and The La's-- just call him Arthur Lee Mavers-- his lyrical concerns now entirely consumed by matters of romance and regret. And that shouldn't come as a surprise given that the Coral's most enduring songs ("Dreaming of You", "Don't Think You're the First") are some of their most candid, and the melancholic, bongo-tapped break-up ballad "Not So Lonely" counts as another worthy addition to this canon. But in Roots & Echoes' more pedestrian turns, Skelly's sentimentality often feels devoid of passionate intent: "Put the Sun Back" is a Sunday-afternoon stroll of a song in which nothing particularly eventful occurs, and while "Jacqueline" boasts a beautiful jangly melody line, the tossed-off chorus ("Oh Jacqueline/ I know") feels anti-climactic. Even opening single "Who's Gonna Find Me", which surges forth with controlled bursts of acid-washed guitar, feels lacking, as its foreboding bridge sets you up for a chorus that doesn't really elevate the song above its standard Motown stomp....full text |
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