Released without any warning or official announcement, Coral's new album “388” was hailed by critics as a delightful, unexpected surprise. A sensation fueled at first by the difficult availability of the album, which slowly entered the catalogs of distributors and shops thanks to incessant word of mouth.
After completing the Potential Trilogy concept album from the neo-psychedelic and more American sounds of their career (“Coral Island”, “Sea Of Mirrors” and “Holy Joe's Coral Island Medicine Show”), Coral took a break, visiting the places where it all began. For a group that has always made dreams the main source of inspiration, it was a natural entry into the world of memories and nostalgia, to the point of putting aside the current stylistic connotation for a moment, halfway between 70s psychedelia and American songwriting in the Laurel Canyon style.
The return to the origins is an act of dedication but also of humility: the passion for reggae music, soul, ska and doo-wop returns to the center of Coral's attention, ready to reap the fruit of this journey through time with a Tascam recorder, the 388 from which the album takes its title, which fully reflects the merits and imperfections of a project which, although recorded in a modern recording studio in Liverpool, confirms the atypical spirit of the band, hastily inserted into the Britpop scene but more similar to the exotic psychedelic pop of The Bees' debut. The only song where faint references to the recent trilogy emerge, the delightful Beach Boys-style vocal intertwining of “Sad Girl”, remains contextual to a project where the past is filtered by references to the graces of the Stax/2-tone style soul exoticisms of “Leave It In The Past” or the incisive r&b sounds of the most danceable song of the collection, “Shame”.
For a record that tends predominantly towards an elegant Jamaican rocksteady (“Let The Music Play”, “Here Comes The Tears”), without this affecting the quality of the writing (the almost baroque-pop ska of “Yellow Moon”) or offering inconsistencies (a song like “Crossing The Sands” is not far from the group's first efforts), it becomes easy to forgive the faint reference to the Sam Cooke classic “What A Wonderful World” which makes it even more affable the intriguing doo-wop of “You And Me (And The Beautiful Sea)”. With “388” Coral confirm that they are skilled craftsmen of pop music, as pleasantly melancholic in the swinging “High TIde”, as they are close to a garage-rock spirit that gives one of the riff catchiest on the album, “Ride That Train”. But don't get too attached to this temporary guise of the band: no one is more unpredictable than a pop group.
06/20/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
