There must have been something in the ether. Only last month, not knowing that they had a surprise album about to drop, I namechecked “groovy Wirral millennials The Coral” in reviewing Ringo Starr’s Long, Long Road, linking them to Merseyside’s “romanticisation of the far side of the Atlantic”. And hey presto, here they are with 388, their 13th album – released without announcement initially in physical shops only – and both their grooviest and their most transatlantic-facing record in quite a while.
The band have always been doused in nostalgic Americana of various kinds, of course. When they broke out in the 00s it was everything from Captain Beefheart to Scott Walker, and from then until now there’s been a deep stream of The Byrds, Love and Laurel Canyon songwriters – which has been the dominant sound of their 2020s releases, and made them feel like maybe they'd settled into their mature sound. On this record, though, they are clearly determined to show their love for 1960s Black music, both American and Caribbean.
More precisely, they are determined to find highest common factors between those things. The sound they’ve built here traces the lines of influence from R&B, doo-wop and early soul into ska and rocksteady and back. Every choppy guitar line and snaking Hammond or Farfisa lick form hooks in their own right, and even the gorgeously mixed, rolling drums play a melodic role as well as driving the tracks along. It radiates scholarship of The Skatalites and The Upsetters and The Paragons, of Muscle Shoals and Stax and The Chi-Lites and Sam Cooke.
There’s even some subtle hints of the Ethiopian funk from the likes of Mulatu Astatke that also drew those same links. Thankfully, it also radiates The Coral. Indeed their songwriting, playing and voices seem revivified by this sense of groove, and as on their best records past, these songs already sound like they’ve been playing them for ever. They have, after all, been playing together since their teens – 30 years! – so there are whole layered levels of muscle and emotional memory and attachment to the past. It’s melancholy but not sentimentalist, and however rooted in mythical and real pasts it may be, it has the band feeling as fresh, maybe, as they’ve ever been.
Listen to "Let the Music Play":
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