The Coral
The Invisible Invasion (Deltasonic)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, September-October 2005

For The Invisible Invasion, the Coral trade longtime producer Ian Broudie for Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, who give the band’s psychedelic pop songs an appropriately unsettling sheen. Despite a few jaunty cuts like the skiffly “So Long Ago” and the sprightly “In The Morning,” it’s a mostly minor-key affair, and James Skelly’s low-key croon maintains the same arm’s-length distance in the Nuggets-like organ freakout of “The Operator” as it does in the more subdued “Far From The Crowd.” The band hews so closely to a single mood that ending with two distinct deviations, “Arabian Sand” (which is like a mutant hybrid of “We’re An American Band” and “Locomotive Breath”) and “Late Afternoon” (which could have come from the third Velvet Underground album), is just about all that keeps the songs from blending into one another.

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