The Coral: Sea of Mirrors (digital outlets)

The previous album by Britain's Coral was Coral Island of 2021 which was one of our Recommended Records and also in our best of the year list.

It is a wonderful concept album based around a seaside town and a band which plays there.

We said of it, “wistful UK pop-rock nostalgia about a lost time and place, the band's history and with brief spoken word interludes. Like an intelligently embellished late 60s' Kinks album, this evoked an end-of-the pier world before Blair and the incumbent. Local, but universal, memory.”

This new one is also tied together by a loose but evocative narrative, although very different.

In the short story which acts a liner essay and guide to the narrative, band member Nick Power writes from the viewpoint of an actor in his trailer reflecting on the Western movie he is part of, the “cardboard cowboy town” he has dreamed of but which is now outside his door, his reluctance to go on set and meet star Eleanor and the fact the rains are coming which will turn the set into paper mache mush.

Through this narrative the Coral weave songs which are sometimes closer to mainstream American country and alt.country than their previous British pop.

Once again however there is that sense of ennui and weariness about the world in which the characters play out the narrative. It's no surprise the rains come.

Their pop sensibilities remain intact: Wild Bird and the pure country of North Wind with suitably twanging guitar, the embellished sway of of That's Where She Belongs (about Eleanor) and the seductive Dream River.

But again too there are lovely arrangements for strings, flutes and harp (by Sean O'Hagan of Brian Wilson-worshipping High Llamas and Stereolab), a brief narration on Ocean's Apart (by Cillian Murphy) and that kind of lush baroque pop which British artists can excel in (the title track, Dream River, Almeria)

There are also strata of metaphysical and philosophical meanings here: “When I see the desert, I see an ocean . . . each is the image of the other; a sea of mirrors and here I am, caught between both”.

Lovely album if not quite the magical collection that Coral Island is.

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You can hear this album at Spotify here