Coil – Musick To Play In The Dark

i have this one with the blue barcode and everything but without a certificate

Having horribly neglected COIL since the late 90s and due to the fact that they are no more, RIP P.C>J.B - i thought it was time i caught up with their catalogue now that downloading has helped with obtaining this very expensive groups discography. This album and its companion are beautiful LPs and i cant believe i didn't hear these when they came out. Never mind. I am now blissfully wallowing in there entire repertoire. I must admit though, Loves Secret Domain is my personal fave.

Absolutely outstanding album. One of my all time favourites.

Check out Michael Bundt's Just Landed Comsic Kid. Coil are definitely paying homage!

this is a flawed masterpiece and one of my personal favourite records of all time.

it's not that the material on the disc is particularly strong; in fact, it's really nothing special if measured in terms of it's complexity, abstraction or novelty. the brilliant part of this disc is the production in all of it's consistently dreary, hopeless, nihilist splendour. the conceptual theme is one of moon music, meaning music designed specifically to be listened to by, well, lunatics - those who live by the glow of the moon.

this theme is maintained through a few techniques, the most dominant, excluding perhaps the reliance on slow tempos and modified vocals, being a reliance on synthesizer parts that are drenched in both distortion and reverb. sending a string patch through a quadrafuzz is indeed a wonderful idea and the record makes excellent use of this oft-ignored truth, crafting often swirling eulogies that cut right through the technological fog and deep into some kind of impossible state of emotion.

another employed technique to maintain the surreal, esoteric feel of the record is the prevalence of long sections of isolated digital effects experiments. the favourite source material would be a vocal sound: a tap on the mike, a phrase or even just a few unusual sounds.

the first track is a post-modern pagan obituary, the second is a cover of a tangerine dream track, the third is some kind of twisted waltz and the last track is a psychedelic pop song, all brilliant in their intent and consistent in their atmosphere. the flaw comes in the 4th and 5th tracks...

coil made this error at least a dozen times. what they've done is cram two unrelated songs into the middle of a concept record because they wanted to release the tracks but weren't sure where else to release them. but, the tracks just don't work...

the fourth track is some kind of a twisted hymn, going on for ten minutes. it's clearly quite consciously written and quite well at that, but the lyrical aspect is just not what i want to hear coming from my speakers all night. the fifth track is a pointless masturbatory exercise and was probably little more than the result of somebody playing with a new toy for the first time.

excluding these two flaws - which the mp3 age makes virtually irrelevant - this album is an essential listen for anybody into psychedelic music through however many orders of separation. the series was initially not received very well by coil fans jonesing for more idm, but it may ultimately age better than much of coil's other work.