ALBUM OF THE WEEK – The Coral – The Curse of Love
Recorded four years before their last album, even now, The Coral still have it and they’re our ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Album Reviews | Released
The Coral – The Curse of Love
Skeleton Key Records
4 out of 5
Four years before the release of their last album, Butterfly House (2010), The Coral went about recording 12 track album The Curse of Love, managing to capture the sentiments of older releases without completely tearing apart the maturity that had been built up throughout the discography.
Recorded in 2006, The Curse of Love was sandwiched between 2005’s release The Invisible Invasion and 2007’s Roots & Echoes; The transition isn’t exactly overt, but compare the stress of a darker strain of indie-rock infused with classic The Coral psychedelia in The Invisible Invasion with the more melancholic, more tainted numbers that made it into Roots & Echoes and you can start to get an idea of how The Curse of Love moved with the direction the sound was taking.
It’s dark, it’s gloomy, it’s wintery. The album opens with ‘The Curse of Love (Part 1)’, providing a good representation of how the next 40 minutes are going to pan out. There’s almost a spoken-word quality to track 1… a sort of olde worlde psychedelic storytelling. It worked for King Crimson, anyway. It’s soft and verges on miserable, but bears the same refreshing stimulation that made the other The Coral albums so easy to become engrossed in.
This continues for some time. Whether medievally psychedelic or catatonic and depressive, there’s a certain consistency about the album in tone and atmosphere. Notes on each song, however varied, always seem to return to this romanticised depiction of walking through the woods in December at about 06:17 in the morning, left in a rigid and dreamlike state from irretrievable antics of the night before. And it is quite a romanticised album, quite poetic. In anticipation of its release, I found myself listening to The Libertines covering ‘Dreaming of You’, and whilst the comparison is very slight, there is just a glisten of Doherty as James Skelly hums “when the hangmen reach the gallows, let the trumpets softly blow” in ‘Wrapped in Blue’.
Standout tracks have to be ‘View From The Mirror’ which, not for the first time, draws on that Simon and Garfunkel eeriness to complement the residing air of internationally-influenced psychedelic murmurs, ‘Gently’, which stirs things up a bit, exploring a slightly different angle of the same concepts behind the rest of the album and ‘The Game’, the acoustic ‘Dust in the Wind’-like offering reminiscent of ‘Falling All Around You’ from Butterfly House.
With the exception of, perhaps, ‘The Golden Bough’, this album wasn’t going to be the next The Coral (2002); The Curse of Love feels a lot more matured, more tainted, and about as far from ‘Dreaming of You’ or ‘In the Morning’ as The Coral seem to get, but for its genuinely engaging lyrics, maintenance and development of the psychedelic edge and the feeling you get that each and every song on the album seems to have been considered and not just thrown in, it was very much worth the wait.
James Reynolds
