The Coral
Magic And Medicine

THE REVIEW

Magic and medicine, sacred and profane, a universe teetering between a past never entirely forgotten and a sometimes foggy future.

Perhaps this is the message that the Coral want to convey through this second effort. The Hoylake group offers us a mature but reckless album, resolute and graceful at the same time, a work based on a precarious yet victorious balance between what was and what could be.

The song that opens it all is "In the Forest", a clear homage to what was. A solemn organ and a soft slide guitar transport us to a decadent forest, where it wouldn't be unlikely to encounter the Doors lost in their strange days. The other side of the coin is well explained by "Talkin' Gypsy Market Blues", an irrepressible old-fashioned blues, played, however, by twenty-something white Englishmen. In the midst of these two extremes, there are several interesting nuances, like the elegant and velvety pop of "Secret Kiss" or the jazzy tones of "Milkwood Blues", which reminds us of the explorations into this genre attempted by the Byrds about forty years earlier, finally landing in the country-mex atmospheres of "Don't Think You're The First".

"Magic and Medicine" is an album where the timbral choices are essential but acertained, the arrangements well thought out and never superfluous, and with a sound steeped in sixties psychedelia that the Coral rework with brazenness and with that touch of typically English "disorderliness". In the midst of this magical-scientific cauldron, there's no lack of a brilliant stroke, "Eskimo Lament". A ballad, punctuated by a few piano notes, that suddenly turns into a post-binge saloon march. At the end of it all, we can only confirm that the Coral have managed to find an intriguing equilibrium, between what was and what could be.