2023-10-25 17:25:09
After the creative, critically acclaimed success of Coral Island became The Coral invited to be the last band in the Parr Street Studios before the Liverpool residence finally closed its doors. The result was material for two albums: Sea of Mirrors and Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show.
Sea of Mirrors is the band’s officially eleventh studio album, regularly released on all common platforms – produced by Sean O’Hagan and, alongside ex-member Bill Ryder-Jones, the actors Cilian Murphy, John Simm and Love guitarist Johnny Echols are also on the guest list – and contrary to the dominant narrative of Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show by its authors as a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness “imaginary, surreal gun-slinging soundtrack to a ‚lost‘ Spaghetti Western“ „directed by Fellini with a Richard Yates-written script” described as “Country rock through a psychedelic lens” with “a sun-baked Morricone-esque flair“ in combination with the in-house, eclectic “signature merseyside sound„.
That in a playlist curated by the quintet, the inspirations behind it Sea of Mirrors summarizes, including numbers by Scott Walker, Lee Hazlewood and Serge Gainsbourg, but also sums up the aesthetics of the record extremely adequately.
Framed and connected by three peaceful, almost shy and fleetingly harmonizing, instrumentally held (and, although the atmosphere continues to spin, actually remaining redundant) escapism interludes remain in a rock-solid, failure-free wave of pleasantly consumable, inconspicuous songs without any outstanding hits (the lovable ear-pleaser Wild Bird in which a fiddle accompanies the bittersweetly soft striding velvet paw stomper, is the most striking song as an unspectacular first single, but there is also little that is really binding.
The cozy, airy and relaxed place to stroll in the carefree sunshine Cycles of the Seasons basically fits smoothly into the band’s standard MO, Faraway Worlds while half asleep, he indulges in a beautiful melody. North Wind maintains a calm, casual forward movement and the title song cruises along in a relaxed manner around an overly repetitive hook with subtle psychedelic strokes That’s Where She Belongs (as the second figurehead) catchy and nonchalant The Way You Are calmer disposition, not only Dream River like the hippie prairie version of the Arctic Monkeys-Lava lamp lounge acts in the dozing flow, from which the routine Oceans Apart with latently cheesy strings, and only the one sung by Paul Molloy Almeria as an acoustic ballad that has fallen out of time shows somewhat more striking contours: Sea of Mirrors Regardless of its concept, it hardly breaks out of the Brits’ previous discography, but adds 37 more than okay minutes that you can’t really dislike.
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