Coral Grief is Lucid Dreaming

I’ll tell you where I was when I listened to “Crumble” for the first time.

I was sitting at Venture Coffee up in Ballard checking my inbox and wolfishly eyeing the last fucking gigantic cookie behind the glass and I got an email from Kay of Den Tapes with the EP attached via Google Drive

you should check out this band

and this was in late July so the weather was already perfect for this. I pressed play - they left the door to the shop ajar so I don’t know whether or not the breeze I felt on my bare shoulders was imagined or not.

“Crumble” is a picture of a rainforest imprinted on an old holographic bookmark. Sam Fason’s guitar echoes trickles into the ears; Lena Farr-Morrissey’s steady bass rumbles overhead; the soft taps of a programmed drum chug underneath. The whole track feels muted, the way snow cancels out street noise. Even as the song ascends across the outro, it doesn’t stop being quite under the level of a pensive hush.

Immediately I bought that cookie and settled in. My interest had been piqued. That they likely recorded it less than two miles away represents, to me, the greatest pleasure of discovering local music. It’s always a treat to be touched by art; when it’s at your doorstep, it’s even better. Proximity tends to heighten everything.

I’ll also tell you where I was when I first saw them live. I’d missed their debut show at the Tractor but my roommate offered a ride to their set at the Central Saloon, where they were opening for a bunch of incredible acts. We pushed our way through a flock of drunk Santas to get to the comically tall stage, where veteran Seattle acts somesurprises and Versing, along with L.A. headliner Dummy, would not take advantage of the height.

I’ve been to the Central, I’ve played at the Central, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Central that packed before in my life. Part of that may have been post-pandemic fervor for human contact. Part of that may have been all the Santas. But you could also sense general appreciation for everyone playing there, including interest in an act that had debuted themselves just over half a year ago. They looked nervous, but they didn’t sound like it. Everything I loved about the EP they replicated on stage, including that introductory track, on which it seemed half the crowd was singing along. How often does that happen for such a young act?

LENA
I knew the song was catchy,
so I get it,
but it was kind of…we were definitely
not
expecting that to actually happen.

The blueprints for dream pop have been redrawn over and over again across the years, in acts like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine and Beach House, but its guiding principles have remained stable. Dream pop is about immersing the listener in sound, goading them to engage with its sheer physicality. Dream pop summons places, people, memories, feelings, passive recollection. It’s actually less “pop” than a branch of rock closely tied to psychedelia: quotidian music augmented by the extrasensory.

For me, in their initial lineup Coral Grief may have subconsciously evoked Beach House in form and function, but scant similarities between the two exist. Both bands write indelible melodies that become one with their atmospheres, but Coral Grief’s brand of aural palpability reaches even farther back, to something a little more cerebral. Yet even across decades of easy references, they still manage to carve out a niche based on their individual elements, whether it’s Farr-Morrissey’s voice - a cross between Laetitia Sadler’s and Hope Sandoval’s - or Fason’s chameleonic guitar work, which jumps between Slowdive and just plain DIIV.

Right after Coral Grief’s Central set, a blonde bearded man with a tan jacket retreated from the drum set and pulled my roommate into an embrace, and it was then that I realized we’d met before; Cam Hancock and I had talked in my kitchen, about nothing in particular, either at some party or after a band practice.

CAM
If you asked me to name a few shoegaze bands or dream pop bands
whatever that means
I probably wouldn't have had something in mind.
I think what drew me towards the songs were that
they're just well written.

Turns out I’d meet him long before meeting the duo responsible for the EP I’d devoured back in July; I walked a mile south past Jefferson Park to the Clock-Out to see them open for Salt Lick, and then afterwards the first thing I said to Sam was that his guitar was too quiet, and then that night I lay awake in bed fretting about what I said.

After over a year of missed connections and rain-checked plans, the trio is finally sitting together in my living room to talk about their next release, Daydrops. It’s a typical January afternoon and we’re all appropriately dressed for the weather; Sam in a neck-hugging sweater, Lena in a dark green dress that just barely ends above the floor, Cam looking exactly like he did when we first met.

The fun thing about talking to local bands about their music is that, a lot of the time, there’s no precedent for the conversation. There are no previous interviews, no research to conduct, nothing to go on other than names and faces and music. This means we get to start from scratch.

- Their beginnings are humble. Farr-Morrissey is a Seattle native who attended Rain City Rock Camp in her youth, where she was assigned bass (to her initial chagrin, until she absorbed its versatility as an instrument and fell in love with it). Fason grew up in Austin, Texas, and picked up a guitar for the first time in his late teens, after which he immediately started buying pedals.

- Both attended college in Colorado, where they happened to join the same band and connected - first musically, and then romantically. She convinced him to move with her to Seattle in 2019, after which they started putting together the strange amalgamation of textures and patterns that make up Coral Grief’s self-titled debut.

LENA
We had played in shoegaze bands before, and this one kind of math-rocky band.
I don't know,
weird stuff.
So I feel like this was kind of a clean slate, and also being
isolated
and really getting no influence from anything,
we could just make something and see if we liked it.
But I don't feel like there was a plan.

&

SAM
It kind of ended up where
we were recording entirely DI.
We didn't have any drums
It was all MIDI drums
It's was all in our bedroom
We were essentially recording what sounded good in that context.

- Out of dissatisfaction with their percussive limitations, they lobbied for a drummer on Instagram. From a mutual friend, they were directed to Hancock. During a dinner at Fiasco down on Stone Way, the trio mutually decided that he’d make a good fit for the act.

CAM
What's nice about this project for me too is that the other bands I play are way different.
This band is sometimes an exercise in simplicity and accuracy.
It’s just about laying it down.
And as I’ve been playing drums for more and more years,
I've realized that the drummers that I admire -
and, frankly, the musicians and songwriters that I admire -
know how to exercise that muscle
just as well as they know how to exercise the flair
and the out-there sort of stuff.
Settling in on a groove and riding that out feels really good too.

- The band held their first show opening for Den Tapes fellows Medium Weekend and Fluung at the Tractor Tavern. Part of it is captured on video. Perhaps it might be Olie running sound, but the band are strikingly adept at recreating the dense atmosphere of their recorded material.

SAM
I definitely have never been that nervous playing a show, before or since.
Usually I'm nervous beforehand and then
I get on stage and
it's fine.
That whole show
I was a little trembly throughout.

- It ended up being an auspicious debut. Ever since, the band has played numerous opening slots for higher-profile artists like Indigo de Souza (at the Vera Project) and Chastity Belt (at the Crocodile). Their sets are never too long; usually thirty-or-so minutes of their best material, bite-sized spells hypnotizing the crowd.

Even in the heated air of the living room, there’s the faintest hint of a chill coming from the familiar gray outside. In its biomes of dewy foliage and lysergic landscapes, Daydrops reflects that corrupted coziness. The production is cleaner, and that scrubs away some of the mysterious lo-fi charm of their previous release. Instead, it’s a more streamlined, broader definition of Coral Grief as a capital-B band. Front to back, it once again represents dream pop executed at a high level, but Hancock’s live drums bring that dream closer to corporeality.

The band recorded Daydrops in piecemeal sessions over several months at Goobyland Studios, a small space in Columbia City that doesn’t show up on Google yet. Neither Fason nor Farr-Morrissey were particularly confident about recording in a studio space with a separate engineer at the helm, yet both remark at the successes they found in the process.

LENA
It’s nice to have that mediator
giving valuable feedback
who's not attached to something
personally or vulnerably.

&

SAM
Someone who's giving a lot of good affirmations
but not being a yes man
Honest feedback, but
building you up when you need it.

&

CAM
I remember there were one or two things he almost fought us on.
Not aggressively,
but he was like
“No, you should do it this way.”
And I was like
"I don't know, buddy
but okay
for now
we'll leave it that way."
And then listening back, he was so fucking right.

Where the self-titled EP pulsed and thrummed, this one races and explodes unexpectedly. Tracks like “Copycat” and “Jenny” shoot up into the air like fireworks, momentarily shattering their hypnotic grooves. “Wow Signal,” similarly to Coral Grief closer “Rodeo Radio,” mesmerically rides Fason’s shimmering arpeggios and Farr-Morrissey’s sinuous bass line like a wave before being swallowed in Hancock’s cymbal crashes. Personally, the EP’s highlights appear in its softest moments, like on the aqueous “January Flowers” or the tempo-shifting title track, which glides on pillows of cavernous reverb and sweet vocal harmonies.

LENA (on “Daydrops“)
“Don’t know how to tell you about myself
Never any rumors
Nothing truthful either
I’m an open book I don’t know how to read”

In a couple of weeks, the band’s taking this music to the masses. First is a record release show at the Sunset, the first time they’ll be headlining a set. Then comes a fourteen-date mix of venues and houses spanning the western half of the country, to be conducted in Fason’s Subaru roof topper. Hancock is a veteran of the road, but this will be the first time Fason or Farr-Morrissey have toured. I told them the thing that my friend Tristan, who apparently lives in a tour van if his Instagram is to be believed, told me about touring for the first time

record everything

because you really only get one first tour. They’re both excited, and their excitement is warranted. The big takeaway from their music, other than that it’s fucking great, is that there are places the country over that will take well to it. Some music is inextricably tied to its place of origin, and some artists strive to make their place of origin part of the story. But Coral Grief’s brand of shoegaze-meets-dream-pop is a generally agreeable sound that doesn’t need a backstory or a background to “get.”

You just have to stand there
- maybe with your eyes closed, maybe with your arms stored away in some fashion -
and listen. And then
their dream
is yours.