CORAL - 388

Released with no advance notice or official announcement, the new album by Coral, "388", was greeted by critics as a delightful, unexpected surprise. A feeling initially fuelled by how hard the record was to find, before it gradually made its way into distributors' and shops' catalogues thanks to relentless word of mouth.

Having completed the trilogy of potential concept albums with the most neo-psychedelic, most American sound of their career ("Coral Island", "Sea Of Mirrors" and "Holy Joe's Coral Island Medicine Show"), Coral allowed themselves a break, revisiting the places where it all began. For a band that has always drawn its main inspiration from dreams, this was a natural step into the world of memory and nostalgia, to the point of momentarily setting aside their current stylistic identity, poised halfway between 70s psychedelia and Laurel Canyon-style American singer-songwriter fare.

This return to their origins is an act of devotion but also of humility: a passion for reggae, soul, ska and doo-wop is once again at the centre of Coral's attention, ready to gather the fruits of this journey through time with a Tascam recorder, the 388 that gives the album its title, one that fully conveys the strengths and flaws of a project which, though recorded in a modern Liverpool studio, confirms the band's atypical spirit — hastily lumped in with the britpop scene but actually closer to the exotic psychedelic pop of The Bees' debut. The only track where faint echoes of the recent trilogy surface, the gorgeous Beach Boys-style vocal interplay of "Sad Girl", still fits within a project where the past is filtered through nods to the exotic Stax/2-tone soul grace of "Leave It In The Past" or the punchy r&b sound of the collection's most danceable track, "Shame".

For a record that leans mainly towards elegant Jamaican rocksteady ("Let The Music Play", "Here Comes The Tears"), without this undermining the quality of the songwriting (the near-baroque-pop ska of "Yellow Moon") or introducing any inconsistency (a track like "Crossing The Sands" isn't far removed from the band's earliest work), it becomes easy to forgive the faint nod to Sam Cooke's classic "What A Wonderful World", which makes the intriguing doo-wop of "You And Me (And The Beautiful Sea)" all the more endearing. With "388", Coral confirm themselves as skilled craftsmen of pop music, as pleasingly melancholic on the swaying "High Tide" as they are close to a garage-rock spirit that delivers one of the album's catchiest riffs, "Ride That Train". But don't get too attached to this momentary guise of the band: nothing is more unpredictable than a pop group.

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20/06/2026