The Oceanic Dream Pop of Coral Grief’s Air Between Us Eulogizes Places Gone

It’s personal for the band, but it’s also allegorical. Isn’t every city like this now? So Air Between Us broadens its title into a double entendre, not just by examining the progressing breakdown of humanity’s connective tissue but in finding gratitude in natural beauty, something much more difficult to erase. That’s where the sound comes into play. Coral Grief, from their self-titled EP onward, had a particular strain of dream-pop on lock: subterranean streams of sound where Fason’s guitar and Farr-Morrissey’s voice merged. At first it was exemplified in sketches like “Crumble,” all heady textures and delicate emotion augmented by its home-recorded charm. Later, with the addition of a real drummer, they upgraded to “Wow Signal,” a track galvanized by Hancock’s fleet ghost notes and cymbal rushes.

Air Between Us is the next step, giving what was once a transcendent (if transient) sound a real sense of place. The band casts themselves as a ship on the open water—guitar sail, bass rudder, and drum hull—guided by Farr-Morrissey’s lyrical lighthouse. Fason’s guitar tones, once aquiferous, are oceanic here, and Nicholas Wilber’s mix leaves more room for his instrument to breathe. On “Starboard,” his swaying strums like daytime saltwater. On “Avenue You,” his glimmering arpeggios form a tremulous storm that threatens to subsume Alki’s shoreside. In their delicate distortion on “The Landfill,” they replicate blinding sun on sand. Farr-Morrissey, as usual, backs him up with bass lines that trade off buttressing Hancock’s rhythm section with carving out emotive melodies of their own, oftentimes on the same song. Her interplay with Fason has defined Coral Grief since their inception, but where they once sketched, they’re painting with real watercolors here, from the zephyrs of the title track to the beaches of “Rockhounds” to the heat lines of “Outback.”

Such smeary textures and mellifluous vocals have become a sonic shorthand for a place you can go to safely disassociate from whatever’s eroding around you, or maybe to untangle the way you feel about it. Air Between Us, peculiarly, is both. It’s an effortless feat to get sucked into its gentle current and let it subtly shift you. But running underneath that current are urgent words: things are never as eternal as they seem, so appreciate them while they’re here and maintain their memory when they’re not. It’s a message summarized in the chorus of the album’s final song, itself a tribute to a ruin: “While you are no more, everywhere will keep you around.”

Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.