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Wednesday, 6 December 2023

Ocean's Apart

More music in the cosmic scouse lineage today, following yesterday's Mick Head songs and a connection to Mick's producer Bill Ryder- Jones, ex- guitarist with today's psychedelic Wirral bunch The Coral. I came  across this song elsewhere and recalled reading a review of The Coral's album, released back in September- Sea Of Mirrors. The reviews had been really positive and the interview I read in early autumn left me making a mental note to check out Sea Of mirrors and its vinyl only counterpart Holy Joe's Coral Island Medicine Show. For whatever reason I didn't do the checking out and The Coral's latest albums slipped off my list until Sunday when I heard this...

Ocean's Apart

The album was billed as the imaginary soundtrack to a lost spaghetti Western film, Ennio Morricone, dreamy Wirral country rock and psychedelia stirred into one pot. Ocean's Apart pretty much fulfills that description with the addition of Cillian Murphy turning up at the end of the song for a spoken word section, and has left me wanting to dig deep into the rest of the album. 

Browsing my music folders I then found another recent Coral song, one called Faceless Angel, a song I don't believe I'd heard until I started writing this post. Faceless Angel came out in April 2021, the lead single ahead of their then new album Coral Island, an album I failed to investigate back in 2021 despite (once again) positive reviews that left me thinking it sounded really interesting and right up my street. This one has skiffle-y railway rhythms, reverb drenched vocals and sweeping strings.

Faceless Angel

All of which leaves me with three Coral albums to get into, two from this year and a double from two years ago. I have some of their earlier stuff, the Skeleton Key EP from 2002 and their self titled debut from the same year, Magic And Medicine and I think  2004's The Invisible Invasion (produced by Portishead) and a couple of singles. And then nothing until all of this. This is the first time I've posted anything by them here too. 

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