By Benjamin Joe
Coral Collapse is a four piece from Buffalo, New York and has put out a new album called “Symmetries” where the members’ individual sounds and melodies meld into a sonic force.
With Gandi Rizek and Kevin O’Connor checking their space on guitars, Seth Zielinski playing the drums, Joel Russell on bass, and O’Connor again on vocals, listening to the band’s lineup is a far cry from just another “slap in the face/drunk in the morning fiasco” but more like a never-ending, not to be forgotten, hurricane in sound.
The band put out their debut album in 2019 called “Don’t Wait to See Me Say Goodbye” but formed in 2015, releasing an EP called “Hafla” in 2016.
Coral Collapse has since walked the line set onto musicians living in 2022. In a Zoom interview between O’Connor, who was speaking from Kentucky, and Russell in Western New York, the two long-time band members talked collaboration and making a mark in the music world even as life continues with its familiar landmarks and challenges.
“I think we start off, generally, together in a room, just noodling around,” Russell said. “Kevin always brings his recorder and from that, sets out the choice mixes and I think we continue to noodle around individually, then come back together, eventually, to put it all together.”
Each song is unique. O’Connor noted that after five minutes, the band could know it’s a song, but other jams sit on his recorder for months at a time before being pulled up.
“I feel that was a song like ‘Apparition’ on the new album,” O’Connor said. “Which is like a darker, weirder track. That song … It didn’t initially hit me as a Coral Collapse song, but sitting with me, it kind of stood out.”
“Apparition” can be listened to on https://coralcollapse.bandcamp.com/track/apparition.
While inspiration strikes in and out of the studio, the band’s journey through the years is a kind of inspiration in and of itself. Between day jobs, kids and out-of-state responsibilities, the four members came together to make an album that almost never happened.
“We had this week where we were just going to go into the studio, and go in kind of raw was the idea,” Russell said. “To go in with some loose ideas and flush them out. Be a studio bank for a week. We had this week and then the pandemic happened.”
Many months later while COVID-19 raged and “everyone was wearing masks” Russel said a studio sounded like the safest place to be. At that point they were all out of practice, jamming in Russell’s garage and outside for fear of spreading the disease, but committed to continue.
“It really wasn’t much work for me to come up with the melodies for these songs,” O’Connor said of the acoustic renderings going back and forth between the bandmates. “They seemed to have a suggested melody already in them. Really the only challenging thing with those songs was trying to fit the lyrics in. … Because we weren’t in the same room … At the same time, we had already written a lot of songs together.”
O’Connor said the band had an idea of not only sounds they’d like to make, but of emotions they’d like to convey, noting that feelings were “harder to talk about” but the band plunged ahead anyway.
The end result is an album that speaks to every part of the room and soul and features a dusky, almost trade book cover feel to its art and name. Russell said this hearkened back to the early 1960s New York scene, which O’Connor also appreciated.
“I feel like ideals were more important then,” Russell said. “Or were just more in the mainstream.”
Other stories on Coral Collapse by this author can be found at:
Buffalo Music Players 