In a way, it's strange that I've decided to start with Coral Fang, even if it just happened to be the album I was listening to when the need to start this series became most urgent. It certainly isn't the most groundbreaking album ever released, or the most typical example of the musical persona I have created for myself. Let's get this noted early, for future reference: my favourite band of all time is Death Cab for Cutie, pipping Bright Eyes and Radiohead by the narrow margin of almost 1,800listens on Last.fm. My ego would like to believe that I'm a prime candidate for invitation into the Society of Awkward and Reflective Kids into Indie (acronym: SARKI), although I unfortunately lack the Seth Cohen looks. It's always been an object of curiosity, therefore, as to why this album has survived the numerous culls of my Windows Media Player library since I weaned myself off the intravenous drip of MTV2 and found the edges of the real music world to be far sharper than I could have imagined.
For those of you who haven't heard of them before, the Distillers were a SoCal punk band whose sole constant was Brody Dalle, their visually and aurally aggressive frontwoman who is now bearing her second child to Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. While her latest project Spinnerette has been given a luke-warm reception, it was the release of Coral Fang that led to Dalle being considered by some as Courtney Love's successor as queen of alt-rock (a title which has probably since been claimed by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). Coral Fang was the Distillers' third and final album, written and released in 2003 during Dalle's bitter divorce to her first husband, Tim Armstrong of Rancid, who she married shortly after her eighteenth birthday during a childhood full of domestic abuse, self-harm and heavy drug consumption. Given all this context, its title and a quick look at its deliberately provocative, ever-so-slightly melodramatic cover, a nude woman on a cross haemorraging razor blades, you should have a decent impression of what Coral Fang sounds like: it fucking stings. Dalle's voice and lyrics are weary, raw and morbid. The guitars have enough bite to tear off chunks of flesh.
When I was asked a question on my brief foray into Formspring last year about my greatest sexual fantasy, I went into a lengthy theoretical description of being with the punkiest person imaginable and wound up realising that I was implicitly referring to Dalle. While I experimented in my teenage years with hair dye and skateboarding, trying to find a way to assert myself in the gritty and claustrophobic suburbs of Manchester, I don't think I have ever truly been a rebel. I have never worn studded belts or boots. I have never considered running away. I have never had the impetuousness to consider getting a tattoo, bearing the feeling of loving something so urgently and unreservedly as to want to have it painfully and permanently blazoned across my skin.
Looking at Dalle aged twenty-four then, captured in music, photographs and videos from the Coral Fang era, I still feel a twinge in admiration. Her hair is jet black, briefly in a mohican, her voice a vicious yet wounded growl; she sports a nose piercing (probably with others elsewhere), and a tattoo across her left arm, a pink bowed skull with bat wings captioned by the words FUCK OFF. I imagine a woman who exudes confidence and vulnerability in equal measure, knows what she wants and doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks (or at least tries her hardest to do both), whose bedroom consists only of a stained mattress, filthy clothes and booze bottles dotted across the floor and song lyrics daubed in angry red paint all over the walls. She seems the sort of damaged individual that I found myself befriending and falling for at house parties or on the Swinton civic centre car park, whose attention and approval I desperately wanted despite vaguely knowing that, by not getting involved, I was probably better off.
I suppose why the reason I value Coral Fang so much is that it transforms that squalor and pain of adolescence and failed relationships into something of a triumph. To me, the songs have a subversive beauty and catchiness in their sheer force, and they have their heaviest emotional impact when Dalle appears all too aware of her bravado - her peppy proclamation of 'All my friends are murderers' in Drain The Blood contrasts heavily with her weary tone at the end of the In Utero-esque clunkalong The Gallow Is God. Listening to the album again, I recognise, as Dalle surely eventually did after The Distillers broke up and she found herself in a far stabler marriage, the bluster we went through (and still go through now, in more subtle ways) as a worthwhile transitional process. Having emerged stronger and wiser somehow makes the drama of it all, however grisly it may still be, a little easier to appreciate. 'Hold onto the memory: it's all you've got', Dalle roars after the chorus explodes in The Hunger. That line couldn't be more appropriate.
