The Coral have been that little band that might for the past three years. I became more than interested in the young Liverpudlians when I started hearing their singles on satellite radio - they had two or three songs in tight rotation from their first two releases. These albums, however, turned out to be classic examples of the old slight of hand trick where you're seduced into buying the album only to find that the two or three songs that you love are surrounded by uneventful to downright awful filler.

Interestingly, the Invisible Invasion is he exact opposite of their first two "hit and miss releases." The tunes on this one are remarkably even from top to bottom, but for all it's consistency there is a marked absence of a stand-out track. The Invisible Invasion demonstrates a noticeable amount of maturation for a band whose past records contained at least three songs that were such classic examples of quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness that they were nothing more than annoying novelty songs. There are no such songs here, but by the same token it's disappointing that there isn't a track that contains any kind of memorable hooks that made their first two albums worth buying.

It's a little strange to own an album that you quite like, but can't find a single song that you could use to turn a friend on to the band with. In terms of their sound, they haven't made any appreciable changes on Invasion, it's still the same likable fusion of the Doors meet the original British invasion. James Skelly is without question one of the more compelling singers to come across the Atlantic in recent years, and there is still a world of promise here. To be honest, though, I would have expected them to have really broken big by now - based on what I was hearing on the radio three years ago.

I was getting acquainted with them about the same time Interpol came along (whom I was every bit as infatuated with at the time) and while Interpol has lived up to my expectations, the Coral's evolution has been somewhat frustrating. They certainly appear to be hell bent on doing things their own way, and admirably they don't seem terribly concerned with any sort of mainstream success. Ironically alot of the time it's bands like that who eventually make their mark commercially - Modest Mouse springs to mind as a good example.