After 20 years in the game, the Coral have been on a creative roll since their 2021 double album Coral Island, based upon a concept of a fictional seaside town but inspired by real life Blackpool. This time, the Wirral band’s even better follow-up – released in conjunction with a vinyl-only album, Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show – was conceived as a “surreal Italian spaghetti western soundtrack,” but the songs contain all manner of metaphors and allegories for crumbling modern Britain.
The magical Wild Bird – inspired when singer-songwriter James Skelly watched a gull fly over the rooftops – alludes to the loss and cost of freedom. The darkly evocative Oceans Apart – where Nick Power’s storytelling words are superbly narrated by Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy – is partly an essay on division. The songs are routinely populated by drifters, dreamers and others left behind by society.
The deeper meanings are there if you want them – but if not there are the 13 tunes, gently lysergic, twang-laden folk-rock beautifully decorated with Sean O’Hagan’s inventive string arrangements. Original guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones crops up in the credits of the Doors-y title track. References to nature and seafaring abound in the likes of North Wind or Cycles of the Seasons. Faraway Worlds – inspired by the places we can go in our imagination – is a beautiful, late Beach Boys-type dreamscape. It all adds up to quite a voyage: the Merseysiders’ most fully realised set of songs since their debut.
