The Coral: Roots & Echoes

Most people used to reach for a thesaurus when seeking to describe The Coral, eager to describe them using bizarre adjectives, looking to match the zanyness of the band.

As time has gone on though, the boys have shifted from creating outlandish ska infused folk-rock to something akin to that of 7 Liverpool lads sat around a campfire with instruments.

The melodies The Coral create are always catchy, they have that down to a tee, it just seems that they're missing the excitement of their debut album in their later works. They show signs of reaching these heights occasionally on "Roots & Echoes", like on the second half of "She's Got A Reason" where everything suddenly shifts up a gear as a pounding tom rhythm breaks into the action, followed closely by a suspense building guitar riff, but all too soon they squander the momentum and slip back into their usual groove of things.

Lyrically as well, the band have dropped the bar, which the vast majority of songs being simple odes to lonliness or dedicated to a female. Long gone are the off-the-wall tales of men metamorphising into plant form and yet these songs always yielded some kind of sense and interpretation. Now everything is just too straight forward. What you hear is what you get.

The Coral used to be a band that could inspire a wealth of creativity in others, now it seems they have only just enough to keep themselves going. Never a compliment to a supposed 'cutting-edge' band is the phrase "your parents are gonna love it."