The Coral

It's been two weeks since I announced a post about The Coral. In these two weeks I've been listening to them extensively and a whole range of phantasies and thoughts have come up to be shared with you.
The first time I actively listened to them was a few weeks ago, it was their album Magic & Medicine, their second one, released in 2003. I found it good enough to become excited when I got their first one, The Coral, as a present. I really liked Magic & Medicine, but had only listened to it twice or so. That's why the debut album was a bit of a disappointment for me then, I was rather interested in discovering Magic & Medicine a bit further than being introduced to something that sounded different. However, everything about The Coral became interesting for me again very recently with their current single Who's Gonna Find Me, an absolutely smashing piece of music. This is the song I have briefly written about in the last post, the video is embedded there as well, but to keep this post complete, here it is again:



This song just got what I'm looking for at the moment - a northern soul beat, great guitars and an extraordinarily good pop melody. Plus it represents one of the singers great gifts: He really can sing! It's not the voice that much this time that makes me crazy. Okay, the voice is distinct and clear (two things I really like), but there's so much more. The strength, the skills! No note is missed and you can hear this guy loving what he does.

With Who's Gonna Find Me blowing my mind away like that I just had to get the record - their fifth, entitled Roots & Echoes. The other songs got less tempo than this single, but still they manage to create a certain magic. I'm gonna write about one particular song here, which to me kinde represents the whole record and what I feel could be the idea behind it. The song is called She's Got A Reason, and can be listened to on The Coral's myspace.

The lyrics are, as far as I understand the song, about a woman in demand, a woman searching for something. She is restless and wanders around:

"...she soaked to the bone
the roads she walks on
well it won't lead her home"

But there is more to it:

"the princess and kings
all the beautiful things
and more

she won't wait
she'll never look back
through the fog
the mirrors have cracked
...
watch her go and she sings
dum dum da da da daaaa"

I can't help but thinking of fairy tales here. Is she like a modern Snow White, a princess who lost all her love, the mirror's cracked and now she is walking through the woods. But if it is so, I think this version of Snow White got a clue about what's going on. She's not really lost, she knows that the road she follows does not lead her back home, but to somewhere else, a place were it can only be better, because anything would be better than being home, "a place where she cries", just like in the fairy tale.

This is my idea of the theme of the song, and I apply it to all the other songs on the record. The topics, I think, are quite similar to this one. "Snow White", or the girl in She's Got A Reason, leaves home because she is rejected by someone. So is the character in the songs Remember Me. In Put The Sun Back we can hear about a relationship that is about to fall apart - it's a last cry for help, to avoid rejection. Rebecca You is not at all this hopeful anymore. Jacqueline went away already, and the song Cobwebs is about reflecting what went wrong with oneself. However, there are lots of strong moments in the lyrics, like in Fireflies, when he sings

"you won't see me cry".

Fireflies also has one of the nicest lines I've heard since Martin Newell's Julie Profumo, I mean as a reflection of my attitude on life. When Martin Newell sings

"take you with me
if you're going that way"

you got

"wherever I'm going
that's where I belong"

in this one. Just like Snow White is leaving to find a new and better home. And she lived happily ever after.


There's loads more to The Coral, but I can't possibly pack it all into one post. Part II coming up soon! You'll be reading about how I found my love for their first record The Coral and how I ended up hearing Dreaming Of You three times in a row three times a day.