Album Review: The Curse of Love by The Coral

After recording their 2006 album The Invisible Invasion with Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley at the helm, the Coral retreated to their home studio and an eight-track recorder to work on a follow-up. After crafting a simple and direct album that still stands as their best work, the Coral were looking to do something a little spookier and more melancholic. They certainly did that with The Curse of Love, but thanks to fears that the record company wouldn't know what to do with it, plus the fact that guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones missed half the sessions, they decided to shelve the album and move ahead in a more traditional fashion.

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Wirral space cowboys The Coral are currently on one of those extended hiatuses, so it’s a neat trick to pull a ‘new’ album out of the can to keep the embers glowing. Recorded between 2005’s ‘The Invisible Invasion’ and 2007’s ‘Roots & Echoes’, ‘The Curse Of Love’ is a neat record, filled with the mystic folk and lithe psychedelia that made them so refreshing back in the day. The knowledge that it was produced on a Tascam eight-track recorder adds to the dusted off aesthetic, but the real goods are in the dream-like, Lennon-flavoured beauty of ‘Gently’ and the powerful fuzz-bombs of ‘The Watcher In The Distance’, songs that should never have gathered dust in the first place.

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Recorded at some point between 2005’s The Invisible Invasion and 2007’s Root & Echoes, The Coral’s ‘lost’ LP The Curse of Love is an oddly bipolar record that can’t seem to decide whether love is indeed a curse or a blessing. Consisting of ten tracks sandwiched between two versions of similar songs, The Coral’s latest release is a far cry from the neo-psychedelia of their self-titled debut – but it also shuns the pop hooks that kept the band firmly in the public consciousness for much of the 2000’s. Initially an intriguing listen, it eventually materialises that The Curse of Love was justifiably scrapped by the band in favour of an all-together more accessible record in ‘Roots & Echoes’.

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