The Coral - Coral - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing. Blues artist ZZ Ward's album, Liberation, celebrates her love of all things blues. Her third on Sun Records, features originals like InchMother,Inch a song about her new role as a working mother, with covers of classics like Son House's InchGrinnin' In Your Face.Inch ZZ's bold vocals also shine on her take on songs from the historic Sun catalog, like The Jesters' InchCadillac Man,Inch and Alvin Robinson's InchSomething You Got.Inch

The Coral return with 388, their thirteenth studio album, officially released following an initial physical-only run through record shops across the UK. Led by new single 'Let The Music Play', the record draws inspiration from the sound and spirit of vintage reggae and dub cassette tapes, while continuing the band's long-standing blend of psychedelic rock, melody and escapism. Following the UK Top Five success of 2023's Sea Of Mirrors, 388 further expands a catalogue that has produced six UK Top Five albums, including the Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut The Coral, alongside Magic and Medicine, The Invisible Invasion and Coral Island, as well as defining singles such as 'Dreaming Of You' and 'Pass It On'.

The Belgian pianist Thérèse Malengreau has a particular interest in the relationship between music and the visual arts. With her first on BIS she offers us a rare opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the music of Hans Erich Apostel, banned as 'degenerate' by the Nazis in 1938, and a rarity in performance ever since. At the same time, her album allows us insight into the interplay between composers and artists in other disciplines during the first decades of the twentieth century, in the context of movements such as Der Blaue Reiter, the arts magazine Der Sturm or the Vienna Workshop. The three works here were inspired by artwork by Otto Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin, two of them appearing on album for the first time. In his Op. 1, the Zehn Variationen, Apostel translates 10 drawings by Kokoschka into sounds - but as Malengreau suggests in her own liner notes, what the music describes is the varying degrees of expressivity and intensity of the drawings, rather than the images themselves. The closing work consists of 60 very brief sketches (less than 40 seconds on average), in which Apostel is reacting to Kubin's drawings (caricatures rather than portraits) of nuns and witches, generals or huntsmen. Apostel completed it in 1948-49, but as early as 1945 it provided material for what is probably his best-known work the ten pieces that make up the 15-minute long Kubiniana.