Always think this sort of choice is good/interesting. I’d be interested in the split between people who were (I guess) 14-19 when Magic and Medicine came out, and people who were a bit older (I was 24 I think).
I’ve voted a 2 as they just passed me by - a couple of okay songs but nothing that made me want to explore them further. But if I had been a sixth-former in 2003 I would have probably been into them. (CF: The Bluetones - who I swore we’d covered at some point on HGATR)
I used to think Dreaming Of You was a banger but I just listened to it again and can confirm it does not bang at all. One of those bands who keep appearing on small local festival bills and I go “oh they’re still together…urgh they’re still together.”
I was definitely obsessed with Dreaming of you for a time, and they’ve got a couple of other songs I like but for a band who at least at the start made a big deal about how diverse their influences are there’s something quite dull about them. They seemed to want to be stranger and wilder than they ever sounded but there’s a folk horror edge that creeps in sometimes that I like. I’m pretty sure they made me give Forever Changes a listen, a fairly safe 3.
21 I was when M&M came out, I thought Pass it on was really pleasant as was the style at the time
Liked them when they first appeared and were doing sea shanties and stuff. Loved Skeleton Key!
Lost interest when they cut out the quirkier stuff and became a proper-lads-with-proper-haircuts type band after the first few albums. Have heard some of their latest album though and it’s really really good! Sounds like they’ve returned to their earlier sound.
I will give The Coral 4/5. The debut album is one of my all time favourite records. I listened to it last night for the first time in a while and it holds up still. Maybe ccb is right, I was 17/18 when that came out so might have something to do with it. Dreaming Of You is one of the best pop songs ever written and stuff like Goodbye, Shadows Fall, Skeleton Key and Calendars & Clocks are far better than anything else around at the time in that vein.
Magic & Medicine is a good album too but does hint that they had something of a boring streak. It does have Bill McCai on though. They have done some other genuinely interesting stuff (Nightfreak etc) but they can also be pretty formulaic and dull especially on the few albums after M&M and I lost touch with them for a long while. They played some of their new stuff on the radio though earlier this year so I had a go on the new record and it’s really quite good.
I met James Skelly once at a club night at Moles in Bath, he was drawing in a sketchbook with a big black marker pen.
Might up it to a 5 actually, getting a lot of nostalgia pangs around the debut. Gonna stick it on in the car on the way to work and have a thoroughly nice time.
I remember them being in the NME a lot around the same time as the Strokes/White Stripes/Libertines etc, and in that context they were a bit of an outlier and semi interesting to the teenager i was. Quite liked the silly occult stuff they were always going on about and tracks like I Remember When and Don’t Think You’re The First had a certain power to them. They always had something of the Radio 2 about them though and they seemed to embrace that more and more on the post-M&M singles, I think?
Haven’t listened to them since about 2005 bar hearing Dreaming of You on an ad. It’s undoubtedly gone into the pantheon of indie disco classics.
I only really know their first album and some of the singles. I loved everything about the first album at the time, but then saw them live just before the second one and I thought they were boring, so I didn’t really bother with their albums after that. I reckon I’d enjoy them if I had a binge.
Some of their singles are brilliant though. They have a knack for writing sad but sunny songs (Pass It On, In The Morning, Put The Sun Back), which I really love. I voted for Put The Sun Back because of the way his voice cracks in it.
Given them a 3.
Bill Ryder-Jones would get a 5. Absolutely love him.
