The Coral - 'Who's Gonna Find Me'
I really like the Coral. I like that they're one of those Liverpudlian bands whose entire creative life is spent attempting to re-learn the lessons of the 1960s, and then bring everything they've learned into modern times. They, and other bands like them, are like a musical version of those historical re-enactment societies who dress up as cavaliers and roundheads, then meet up in some farmer's goat pasture to have another crack at the battle of Naseby. And for this they deserve some respect.
What I especially like about the Coral is that they used to be able to fuse this kind of dusty, bookish, olden-days approach with some proper psychedelic madness, exactly like the sort of stuff they really did back in the '60s, where folk guitar, rock beats, pop harmonies, church organ and the sound of a million grumpy wasps could be fused together into a delightfully strange quilt of mad colours.
Sadly this quilt has become a bit drabber of recent years. It's as if the panels of vibrant cloth they used to be able to find lying about all over the place have become scarcer and scarcer, and now the only replacement material to hand is brown corduroy.
Not that there's anything wrong with brown corduroy, it's a very dependable fabric, warm, makes a comfy pair of trousers and you can run your nails up and down the nap and make it change colour from dark brown to lighter brown. This method can even be applied if you want to write your own name on your trousers, which is fun, in an idle moment.
HOWEVER, exciting, vibrant, startling, challenging, thought-provoking, clever, (and most of all) psychedelic, is is NOT. And that's not really in the spirit of a colourful era like the '60s after all.
Which means that even though they came out as dandy cavaliers, somewhere along the line the Coral have turned into dour roundheads, and that's a bit disappointing.
Download: Out now
CD Released: July 30th
(Fraser McAlpine)
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