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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. But anticipating the accusation is a reckless,
poor substitute for having the balls to avoid it in the first place.
The NME, like so many of the UK press, never hedges its bets when
it comes to announcing your new favourite band simply because it
is wilfully able to produce the kind of hype that is necessary to
prove it. Rather than being detached observers of greatness, the
press make significant and interested interventions. Always with
surprise. Always with mock indifference. It's a product of and a
product perpetuating it's own myth. Take The Strokes
in 2001 and The Hives in 2002: a feature in every issue, a
face on every cover, a story for every occasion. And what a funny
old self-referencing system it is all too: "Hey this band's bloody
marvellous. And 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 where's it at. 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??
What could be better is announcing a genuine talent with a more modest
and less clamourous brodcasting style. And do The Coral fit
these criteria? Well you better hold on to all your emperors' new
hats, because it could very well be true.
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:
"Music has been forgotten and been replaced by attitude.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".
Explains Coral's frontman, James Skelly who admits to having
so little regard for radio music and airfix punk that 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 the UK city 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.
This veritable 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.
And yet for all its muscular charm it doesn't sit squarely with the
solid, honest genius that lies elsewhere on this record. But then
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. Either that, or we simply don't have any folklore left of our
own. And judging by our youth's own treacherous embrace of urban
gangastaisms, it is of course entirely likely.
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 had hooked up with
Lord Byron and Jim Morrison and gone crazy in a brothel. It is 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
ku 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, dear boy. Quite simply 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:
http://www.thecoral.co.uk
Alan Sargeant for Crud Magazine© 2002
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| 04/02 1 Giant Leap - My Culture
04/02 Elfpower Interview - Andrew Rieger - Creatures
04/02 Frou Frou Interview - Guy Sigsworth/Imogen Heap
04/02 Gomez Interview - Ian Ball
04/02 Idlewild - Live - London Astoria
04/02 K's Choice Interview
04/02 Leaves - Live - Camden Dingwall
04/02 Longwave Interview - Exit
04/02 Lucy Mongrel Interview
04/02 Oasis - The Hindu Times
04/02 Phantom Planet - Interview
04/02 Unwritten Law - Interview
04/02 VUE - Coordinates Interview
05/02 BRMC - LIve - Kentish Town, London
05/02 Breeders - Title K
05/02 FC Kahuna - Machine Says Yes
05/02 Moco - Live - London Monarch
05/02 Need New Body - Interview
05/02 The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Live - Soundhause, Northampton
05/02 The Bellrays - Meet The Bellrays
06/02 Fleadh Festival - Finsbury Park
06/02 Frou Frou Coordinates Interview
06/02 Incubus - Interview - Mark Einziger
06/02 North Mississippi Allstars - Interview
06/02 Papa Roach - She Loves Me Not
06/02 Proud Mary - Live - Northampton, Soundhaus
06/02 Pulp - Live - Sherwood Pines, Edwinstowe
06/02 Reindeer section - You Are My Joy
06/02 Silverchair - Diorama |  | 06/02 Something Corporate - Leaving Through The Window
06/02 Soinc Youth - Interview
06/02 The Burn - The Smiling Face
06/02 The Coral - Live - Roadmender, Northampton
06/02 The LIbertines - Live - The Social, Nottingham
06/02 The Vines, Sheffield Leadmill
06/02 Trik Turner - Interview
06/02 Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Live, Soundhaus, Northampton
07/02 12 Stones Interview
07/02 Arolo -Interview
07/02 Buy To Let Doncaster - Anti Social Behaviour
07/02 Cassius - Interview
07/02 Farrah - Interview
07/02 Glassjaw - Interview
07/02 Neil Michael Haggerty - Interview
07/02 Hoobastank - Running Away
07/02 Leaves - Interview
07/02 LL Cool Jay Interview
07/02 Oasis - Live - Finsbury Park, London
07/02 Polyphonic Spree - Live - Camden Monarch
07/02 Queens of the Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
07/02 Super Furry Animals - Interview
07/02 The Beatings - Live - Metro Club London
07/02 The Bellrays + The D4 - Virgin Megastore, Oxford Street London
January 2001
July - August 2001
September - October 2001
November - December 2001
January - March 2002
April - July 2002
August - December 2002 | |
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