It could've been some lost chapter from High Fidelity. Monday morning and you've skipped lectures to fumble through the discount racks in your local record store. Across the shop floor, there's a pair of pallid, corduroy-clad indie kids, one of them clutching a copy of Magic and Medicine.
"I like The Coral," he says, reciting his best music journo impersonation: "They're like Love's Arthur Lee singing sea shanties with the Beefheart band while The Cramps play pirates together."
"Oh, well, in that case," his friend snaps back, just within earshot of the Stereolab fan whose eye he's trying to catch, "you can't have heard anything by The Cramps."
Influence-spotting is one of the best-loved pastimes of the armchair music fan; reel off a dozen inspirations behind The Unicorns' album and watch jaws drop at your obsessive, nerd-like knowledge of all things psych-pop (hell, sometimes you might even be right). Indeed, it's true that almost all new music can be sourced back to a few solitary giants who trod their paths before anyone else. But there comes a point where you have to step back and wonder whether such records are an inspired synthesis of the strange and beautiful, or simply the bored shrug of artists without any ideas of their own.
It seems the jury is still out on The Coral. Though their self-titled debut was a schizophonic monster of noise, blues and Beatle-delic pop, effects peddles and stoner rock, it was lacking in substance and cohesion, and sounded more like a gang of kids on a school trip discovering what they could do in a recording studio than a creative tour-de-force. Furthermore, its songs were not the white-knuckle, feedback-fuelled stomps they were hyped as, but merely stitched-together fragments of ideas, upon which frontman James Skelly sketched some rough melodic framework. Still, where that album disappointed in its application, it at least astounded with its audacity. On Magic & Medicine, the band's frenetic freakout leanings have been stripped away in favor of a more humble approach, placing subtlety and songwriting above the sounds being produced. It all sounds far less interesting.
Opening track "In the Forest" sets the slowed-down tone instantly-- all antiquated organ chords and ghostly vocals-- before the cloyingly kooky maraca-shaking and spaghetti-Western guitars of "Don't Think You're the First" make you worry that maybe the band's increased attention span has smothered the smashed frontierism and drug-injected vitality of the band's debut.
To the band's credit, it's not all downtrodden disappointment. "Pass It On" is the kind of condensed, country-flecked pop that their debut had dreamt of; "Careless Hands" caresses the legacy of Love with its flamenco flourishes and tempo changes; and "Leizah" is a heartbound brood of naked 60s pop that avoids hand-wringing earnestness through the realization that the song's main muse probably doesn't even exist. In fact, much of the record relies on the power of its narrator, as James Skelley's sideways scouse croon sounds both brash and beautiful, drunken and emotive, with lyrics (such as on the buoyant summer-strut of "Bill McCai") that can be stark, surreal and affecting all at the same time.
Unfortunately, the concessions gained by Magic & Medicine are virtually obliterated by the rushed monstrosity of its companion piece. Issued in the UK as a limited edition release to fill the void until their third full-length, Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker is a flatulent, irrelevant, self-indulgent attempt at recapturing the hotwired spontaneity of their debut through a dirge of sub-par psychedelia and try-hard freakouts (such as the frankly appalling "Auntie's Operation" and "I Forgot My Name"). Indeed, it ends as such a mess of absentee melody and soundchecked jam sessions that its only redeeming qualities lie in the nu-disco dalliances of "Venom Cable" and "Grey Harpoon", with their Rapture-esque samples and wisps of cyclical guitar.
In the end, Magic & Medicine and Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker find The Coral at quite a pivotal moment in their development; torn between the idea-loaded diversity of their debut and the radio-friendly pop sheen that turned its heir into a chart-dwelling success-- and unable to effectively straddle the two. It finds them wading through their influences, unsure how to integrate their rampant eclecticism into something more substantive. If the band do have, as many suggest, a truly great album in their grasp, perhaps now would be a good time to prove it. If not, we may all have to settle for the real thing.
