"I remember at the start of it, saying it weren't going to be like this", Coral singer James Skelly recently pondered. "Now it's just overdrive and we're on the conveyor belt. It sucks your soul. We're lucky we've got the good songs to pull us through."
Two years and two albums in, and the industry machine has already begun to squeeze the spirit of the Liverpool six-piece. Fortunately, as Skelly rightly claims, they've got the skills to pay the bills, to coin a playground boast. Not that school appears to have been much more than a passing yawn for The Coral. While their mates dirtied knees on the sports field and crippled fingers on Playstations, they, presumably, learnt the musical folklore, dreaming-up fertile tales and the wildly festooned sonics to match.
The band's initial rise was akin to witnessing a Catherine Wheel tearing from its moorings and firing into the sky, the fizzing rainbow of colours representing every stripe of the rock'n'roll canon. All at the same time. Indeed, while the handsome derangement of The Coral was eminently impressive, the self-titled debut LP was dangerously unhinged and insanely eclectic.
'Magic And Medicine' bids to reflect a band in tune with the songs they're playing, rather than skewering holes from within the skin of each track. For the most part, it's a success. There is far less of the disorientating, wilful chaos that punctuated their debut. The Coral have refined their influences, dropping some of the more incongruous blasts and revelations for a more concise, controlled dervish of Northern guitar colour and shade, West Coast psychedelic fever and Spaghetti Western landscapes and atmospherics.
Opener 'In The Forest' peers eerily from the speakers, a doomy vision of a hypnotic temptress, like Ian McCulloch fronting The Doors. It's an impressive, if rather languid start, immediately followed by the dustbowl shoot-out of 'Don't Think You're The First', the galloping pace accompanied by Skelly's dismissive musings on the bittersweet KO of love, like a fresh-faced Valentino.
Alongside a bounty of pure, addictive tunes, there is romance here in abundance. However, it's twisted, hearts already damaged by deception, betrayal and cynicism. 'Liezah' bristles with foreboding, despite the glistening strings and wicked change of pace, Skelly warning "she will cut you down to size". The menacing fractured blues mantra of 'All Of Our Love' promises love, joy, hate and pain in equal measure and glorious current single 'Pass It On', beyond the jaunty thrust, is brutal and burnt.
However, it's at times evident that in restraining their latent ambition - only realised here in the closing mild epilepsy of 'Careless Lives' and 'Confessions Of A.D.D.D' - The Coral have also lost some of the audacious, wide-eyed nerve that so propelled their rise. Consequently, there are notable dips during the course of 'Magic And Medicine', and while the likes of 'Talkin' Gypsy Market Blues' and 'Secret Kiss' may thrash and flow respectively, it's in a rather unconsuming fashion. But these moments are rare on a record of unerring fluency.
Ultimately, it will take more than the nefarious music industry to stop this precocious band from nailing a thoroughbred masterpiece in the coming years. After all, as 'Magic And Medicine' attests, they've got the songs to pull them through. The Coral need concern themselves with nothing else.
