The Distillers' Coral Fang Album Art
Coral Fang, which is, by a fucking mile, my favorite Distiller's album has, and likely always will, be stuck in my rotting brain during the last year of my art school career.
Whenever I hear this album a part of me will always remember hunkering down in my purple painted "office" (I'll get to that") fighting tirelessly late in to the night with Macromedia Flash, trying to get the motion tweening just right between my two very deliberately placed key frames.
See, circa 2003-2004 I was in the throes of my final year as a "Media Arts and Animation" student at the now defunct and hollowed out Art Institute of Colorado, which despite it just being a mere shell of a building with no functionality left to it, still manages to claim monthly payments for me from my time spent there over 20 years ago.
I was living in a two bedroom apartment in a rapidly deteriorating building that I'm pretty sure was a front for some nefarious mafia related activities, as the landlord, know simply as "Constantine" appeared as if he just walked out of a more ridiculous scene of The Sopranos, un-aired Denver spin off show.
The building came replete with an elevator hoisted by hamsters on a spinning wheel, a pool that resembled a pool only in that it had water in a concrete hole in the ground, and a neighbor, who, when not asking if I had any spare lightbulbs, blasted the Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" song, on repeat, as if the world was lacking it's presence.
To combat these perks, I decided, in my art school wisdom, I would paint the second bedroom, what I was calling the office, which is really just where the shoddy desk that contained my laptop and Star Wars figures, purple. Like fucking Prince purple. For "serenities" sake. Which I did, and when I was able to be in there by myself, while listening to Coral Fang, did provide the much needed serenity I needed to focus on compiling my animation demo reel and art portfolio that would launch me into a never-ending art career.
I had been a fan of The Distillers previous two albums. They're still super solid examples of punk aggression and Brody's voice is fucking perfect for this music, but Coral Fang, when I heard that shit, it was on another level. Much less a straight forward punk album and more a grungy, Hole-like, inspired album that plunges to the depth of heart ache and the surrounding explosions of emotions that come with the crumbling of a relationship. If you ask me, few albums deal with this shared experience more affectively, and infectiously, as Coral Fang.
Despite this being one of my favorite albums, I never managed to see the band live due to whatever reasons, until 2019, when the were one of the opening bands that would accompanying the Misfits reunion in Denver. Now as much as I love the Misfits, and that's a whole fucking lot, I was almost as excited to see the Distillers.
And they did not disappoint. A set list that drew heavily from Coral Fang, 35 minutes of pure bangers, no stage banter, and off they went, into the night, to set the stage for the arrival of the Misfits.
I intended to spend a fortune on Misfits merchandise, but quite honestly, none of it was to my liking, so I bought the one and only shirt The Distillers were selling, in a size that is too small because the battle to get rad concert tees in XXL is eternally uphill, but I didn't care, I'd finally seen The Distillers, a band that made an album that meant so much to me during a difficult time and has continued to be among my favorite album of all time ever since.