Indie rockers The Coral formed in 1996, releasing their self-titled
debut album in 2002 and are probably still best known for “Dreaming of you”
which appeared on that album. That is
where I discovered them but after the first few albums, I must admit I did lose
track of them. But they didn’t stop and became
an established British band in their own right and winning support slots with Oasis,
Blur, Artic Monkeys and more recently in 2018 the Manic Street Preachers. And
on the tour with MSP is where I re-discovered them and quite frankly, they really
impressed me. They released “Moving
through the Dawn” later that year which I thought was the best thing they ever
done.
Moving forwards now when The Coral announced they were releasing a double album and I was highly sceptical. Mainly because double albums are very difficult to pull off. You need to have a lot of good material and be able to keep the listener engaged for a long time. While The Coral’s last album was good. “Coral Island” is their 10th album so how can a band still be in that zone for writing so much and keep the standard as high as their last album. Look at Coldplay whose last album was “Everyday life”, a double album which contained some of their best material ever but also contained some of their worst. There is a reason why bands often do double albums once in their career and probably on the most part never.
As the singles started to drop like “Lover undiscovered” I was impressed and clicked that pre-order button. Could The Coral pull it off? Well, I am telling you now, they did pull it off and looking at the album I don’t think they had a choice but to release it as a double album. The whole concept of “Coral Island” is fascinating. There is even a book to accompany the album. The album is 24 tracks and comes to 54 minutes altogether. Now if The Coral were to release one CD it would probably come to 25 minutes. If they did this it doesn’t matter what the quality people would complain it is too short.
So how come it’s 24 tracks and only 54 minutes. Well 9 of
the tracks are about 1 minute long and while some do have instrumental bits in
the background, the purpose of these tracks is for narrator to tell the story
of Coral Island. He is one of the brother’s
grandfathers who is 85-year-old Ian Murray.
Who has the voice of a complete legend and adds so much to the album and
the story. This mean the actual album is
in effect 15 tracks long. Spread over the two CDs – Disc 1 “Welcome to Coral
Island” and Disc 2 “The Ghost of Coral island”.
The songs are as if you are travelling from one season to the next with
the warm upbeat melodies on the first CD, with the colder more haunting sounds
of the second CD.
On the first CD “Welcome to Coral album” my favourite tracks are “Lover Undiscovered” and “Vacancy” but there are so many warm uplifting tracks like this, and you do think The Coral are really well and truly in their element with these kinds of tracks. My two favourite tracks on “The Ghost of Coral Island” are “Take me back to the summertime” and “Calico Girl”. Both features piano and I must say its so nice to hear the piano played in an upbeat tempo. So many bands these days use the piano for sadder slower songs, but these songs are so fun and uplifting. “Land of the Lost” is one of the more haunting tracks on the second CD and has such a great guitar solo in the outro.
Overall, this is a fantastic album and their so much to discover here. It’s a bold move to do a double album, especially one so different with all the narration but it does work so well and since the narration tracks only last a minute at intervals throughout the album it is broken up well. The quality of the music is on par with the best they have ever done. While they released a singles collection already, if they were doing it again it would be tough just to pick which singles off this album to choose such is the standard set throughout this whole album.
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