A review of Coil's "A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room"

Since the promise and eventual acquisition of a handful of "lost" Nine Inch Nails remixes created by Danny Hyde over on the Echoing The Sound discussion boards*, I've decided to go back and actually listen to some of Coil's twisted, terrifying and, at times, incomprehensible and unlistenable discography. Luckily, there was a time (probably about six minutes or so after I heard Trent Reznor talk about how amazing they were and how much they inspired and impacted his own sound) when I downloaded their entire catalogue, and it was still right where I left it, gathering whatever the equivalent of dust is for mp3s.

I had no idea where to start, so I went with something titled "Black Light District". After doing some digging**, I learned that "Black Light District" is one of the dozen or so aliases the band had used over its twenty year career, and that the album by BLD is actually called A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room.
Anyway, I've decided to listen to one Coil album a week, in no particular order, and report back on how it is.

First things first, this album could also have been alternately titled Music By Which Serial Killers Murder Scarecrows In A Dead City To. A lot of this isn't, technically, music, more...horrors. If more horror movie composers tried for this kind of sound, "horror movies" would become "screaming nightmare kill movies". I listened to this while going through my daily commute and my usual jaunts around the city...and it made everything hyper-terrifying...in broad daylight. One should never listen to this at night. I had it playing during the snowstorm on Wednesday, and it turned the winter wonderland that is New York City under a fresh coat of snow into a broken graveyard under which every puffy groundcloud of white lurked a rotting, sentient, starving corpse. COIL DID THIS.
While I originally thought that it would have been awesome to see these guys collaborate with a more melodic, song-based artist, I have since changed my mind; these things that they have created exist on their own and they are perfect in that way (plus, their extensive remix catalogue is a pretty fair example of what that original wish would have sounded like...hint: it sounds like an awesome nightmare). Everything sounds ritualistic, the songs, their titles, the sounds in their songs...
The first time I actually felt afraid while listening to ATLDR was during the third track, "Die Wölfe Kemmen Zurück", which consists chiefly of a droning noise punctuated by some repeated metallic clanking...for ten and a half minutes. FUCK YOU! YOU HAVE TO HEAR IT BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME INSANE! Look, I'll put it this way: have you ever had a scary dream? A scary dream that was so intense and terrible that it actually scared you awake? Now, have you ever tried relating said scary dream to someone, only to find them shaking their head and saying, "I don't get it"? That is what's taking place here. So, I say again, FUCK YOU! YOU HAVE TO HEAR IT BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME INSANE!
It isn't until the fourth track, "Refusal Of Leave To Land", when we finally hear John Balance's voice, and it is just as unpleasant as the sounds surrounding it; creaking and sharp with reverb, almost reptilian, it is a perfect compliment to the "instrumentation" in which it's swaddled. This is also the first track to have any real melody to speak of; some isolated, haunting notes, played backwards on a keyboard, sinking in a mire of noise.
"Stoned Circular II" also has something like melody, although it's more like...repeated sounds that form a phrase that falls somewhere on the musical scale...? Fuck it, whatever, there's a bass guitar in it, okay?
"Green Water" was recorded in a swamp. In R'lyeh***. And it goes clammy, glabrous tentacle in clammy, glabrous tentacle with "Cold Dream Of An Earth Star". I literally shudder to think of what is having such dreams as these...
Then, out of nowhere, a solid, straightforward (if slightly creepy) electronic track called "Blue Rats"...which is, naturally, followed by a minute of jarring, oscillating noise called "Scratches and Dust", before the final track, "Chalice", begins.
"Chalice" is beautiful like a flower arrangement at a child's funeral.
P.S. The child killed itself.
P.P.S. Because it listened to this album.

And that, reader, is Coil's A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room.
I don't know where you can find it or if it actually exists outside of my mind, but, hey, if it doesn't, then I'm certainly in for quite the time.
I'll be back next week, unless I've eaten my own face to death.









* I'll get into this and my first exposure to Coil during this month's Bitchfest.

** Read: "typing 'coil black light district wiki' into Google"

*** YOU FUCKING PROVE ME WRONG, ASSHOLE.