The Coral: The Coral

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

It starts threatening to turn into the Turtles' So Happy Together before turning into a mad sea shanty about setting sail on the Spanish Main. It ends 40 or so minutes later on a hidden track - after one of those maddening extended silences - which eventually lurches into a drunken singalong of Marley's Get Up, Stand Up.

In between, this young gifted and scruffy Liverpudlian mob bunch cram in ska, outbreaks of Cossack shouting, Egyptian surf guitar, parping saxophones, Fabs harmonies and a feeling that the Coral's regard for rock's original psychedelic era has mutated from affection to genuine inspiration.

They can sometimes sound like a saltier, drunken Gomez, as on Badman especially care of cool-rasping singer James Skelly. But then they go and manage to give their kaleidocope another hefty shake to deliver something very wiggy indeed. It's at its wiggiest best on the likes of the manic Skeleton Key - the Pogues from another planet, sort of - the opus Goodbye, and the nifty disarmingly straight 60s pop of Dreaming of You.

Points off for the Marley vandalism but the Coral - so named because they get wrecked on reef-er perhaps? - have taken rock floatsam and jetsam and created a great debut album.

Label: Deltasonic