Ride The Train

The Coral's album from earlier this year, their thirteenth, is a good album that demonstrates their strengths and versatility. Also, their ability to follow their collective noses and the best part of three decades in still come up with the goods. For 388 they went back to the music they listened to as teens- ska, reggae, dub and rocksteady- and used it as a starting point. 1960s and 70s Jamaican and Ethiopian jazz crossed with West Kirby. The playing sounds live and rich and the nicely loose. 

'Play that song again/ You know the one/ The one we used to smoke to/ When we were young', the album opens with on Let The Music Play and James Skelly transports himself back to that time but singing with the voice of a middle aged man. There's no cod reggae on 388, it's not white men pretending to be Jamaicans but it's an authentic musical bedrock to their latest batch of songs. I can't promise it will change your life but its a cracking album, good songs, played and sung with feeling. 

Try this one Ride That Train...

Back in 2001 The Coral, still in their late teens and early twenties, released a debut album that veered between pirate songs about skeleton keys, mad 60s psyche, sea shanties and whatever else they fancied. It was exciting and weird, a psychedelic Wirral on black vinyl. They made Magic And Medicine fairly quickly after, slightly ironing out some of the crinkles and going 60s pop- Dreaming Of You was a deserved hit.

Dreaming Of You

The follow up, Nightfreak And The Sons Of Becker went back to the freak music, Beefheart and Love and gently surreal psychedelia of Super Furry Animals. In 2005, only four years after their debut hey released their fourth album The Invisible Invasion. It was produced by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley of Portishead, a stripped down version of the 60s psyche they'd been refining over the previous four years with some folk and pop thrown in. This song was everywhere for a while, a gorgeous tune with a real lightness of touch, Wirral psyche- pop.

In The Morning

On the album it's preceded by A Warning To The Curious, all reverb and echo, low key weirdness and with a hint of the Bunnymen lurking inside it.  

A Warning To The Curious

Arcadia

Brexit Day 2 comes today and we're still in the European Union. We may leave on May 22nd or June 30th or October 31st or possibly the 32nd of never. I've had to back off from the news and the articles recently. I don't think it's been good for my health, the constant drip-drip-drip of idiocy, the voxpops that tell us nothing and the self-styled 'hard men of Brexit'.

I watched a film on BBC 4 recently, Arcadia by Paul Wright. Constructed entirely from archive footage from the BFI, local news reports and found footage, Arcadia is a deep dive into an older and weirder country, the strangeness of rural Britain in an hallucinatory collage, stitched together in a flood of images of folk (in both senses of the word folk), almost a remix of social history- 1920s nudists, postmen wading in streams, ravers, English Civil War re-enactors, Maypoles and Morris dancers, young men in tweed suits cavorting outside thatched pubs, a woman with her pet poodle which she has had stuffed, pagans, Stonehenge, foxhunting, men fighting in the village streets over a football, cheese rolling in Gloucestershire- all these and more, in a rush of the past. This clip gives a glimpse into it but really you need to see the whole thing. I'm not sure what, if anything, this has to do with Brexit but it's a good counterpoint to all the noise coming out of Westminster.



The soundtrack is incredible as well, starting out with the cut glass voice of folk singer Anne Briggs and then working through analogue synth sounds, strings, glam rock's stomp, punk's fuzz guitars, some snatches of acid house and ending with a synth version of Jerusalem, courtesy of Will Gregory of Goldfrapp and Adrian Utley of Portishead. Buy it here.