The Coral - Put The Sun Back
[Deltasonic]

There was a time when The Coral were being touted as the most exciting new band in Britain, alongside The Music (remember them?) and they even spawned a whole genre of soundalikes like The Zutons and The Bandits (again, remember them?) born at Liverpool's monthly night The Bandwagon.

Their early EPs and indeed first album was full of youthful energy and promise. Now if we jump six years ahead to 2008, the Wirral band are anything but the potential their early EPs suggested the future had in store. Put The Sun Back is another dreary, unimaginitive, Radio 2-friendly and overly 60s pop effort. The older generation will love it (well, it does sound very familiar afterall) and it's very clean-sounding and catchy (cue lots of radio play). Sure, this is music that would have sounded brilliant over 40 years ago, but it is saddening to find the band are now looking at being mere retro-revivalists as a means of purely paying the rent.

Gone is the excitement, along with the ambition to create inventive, original and interesting music; instead we're left with another bunch to add to the elevator-theme-tune brigade alongside Travis, Embrace, Keane etc.