Nightfreak & the Sons of Becker (The Coral, 2004)

The legendary sketch-comedy show Mr. Show once ran a piece on a competition for the best Halloween-themed album of all time. The joke was that every song sounded like "The Monster Mash" and critics were complaining about how inaccurate the lyrics were ("If Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy all got together the result would be an epic battle, not some bash!").

Anyway, Nightfreak & the Sons of Becker, the second and a half album by the Coral (I will explain in a moment) doesn't sound like "The Monster Mash", but a spooky aura hovers over the entire album, from the overt ("Why Does the Sun Come Up?") to the freakish ("Auntie's Operation"). It's a wild ride of a about half and hour that drops you off back in the comfort of a cute finale song, sort of like the end of Splash Mountain, a comfortable end following a terrifying drop.

Nightfreak is generally not considered an official Coral album, given it is quite short, was recorded very quickly, and generally does not observe the band's trend of increasingly "normal" sounding music. The band bashed it out very quickly, rewarding those who enjoy spontaneity and punishing those who would have preferred a better thought out recording method. Clocking in a just around half an hour, it's longer than an EP but shorter than a full LP, so it's been called a "mini-LP". In the US market, they simply threw it in as a bonus disc to the more level-headed Magic and Medicine, recorded the previous year, resulting in one of the best music deals in history for the few and proud American Coral fans.

Future albums would continue to strip the weirdness out of the music. The "pirate" sound that dominates this album and the first album (and bits of the second) was largely absent from the next album, The Invisible Invasion. Albums after than would continue showcasing a much more careful band, not one that dabbled in weird topics and pirate rock, largely to the disappointment of many, though one could argue the earlier sound was unsustainable and it's just a sign of "maturity". Who knows.

This year the Coral will release the "lost" 2006 album The Curse of Love. We'll see if that shows a possible restoration of the old silliness that made this and the other early albums so much fun to listen to.