A review of Coil's "Astral Disaster"

Okay...roll with me here. After a few listens and a few nights to reflect on Astral Disaster...I think this might be a concept album...about aliens crash landing a ship on the coast of some early human civilization and the details and events surrounding said crash and if you disagree..that is totally okay, because I'm never sure of anything with these guys.

My thoughts during "The Avatars", the first Coil I'd listened to after the citrus-and-coconut-suntan-lotion-flavored Love's Secret Domain and the solemn and beautiful Moon's Milk was, "Ah, here we are! The buzzing robot birds and electric dissonance of the Coil I know and persist through! Hello, Astral Disaster, I gleefully look forward to whatever special hell you have in store for me!" But, after listening through the whole album and coming back around to Avatars...I think this might have been some transmission or distress call. What we're hearing is what those primitive humans heard when they approached that huge, mysterious craft, half buried in the sand: a call for help, but in the aliens' native tongue, before the translation software had kicked in.
After my eighth or ninth week of listening to and reviewing Coil albums, I was getting tired of using the adjective "spiritual" to describe their work. So, when the phrase "visitation from an ancient alien race" occurred to me while listening to "The Mothership & The Fatherland"*, I was happy to roll with it. Running a little under twenty two and a half minutes, there are a few different events taking place during this track; things start off warm but sorrowful, there's nothing threatening about these visitors. Perhaps this is the ship's log, or the story of their race... Out of nowhere, sharp keys distort and shred the calm, creating a real sense of fear and menace, is this static or some sort of attack? It fades away, but comes in and out for the duration of Mothership but doesn't actually interrupt the calm wash in the background, so I'm more inclined to view this as static and nothing more. Eventually, there are some faint sounds which could be radio transmissions. The music begins to sound more bright and celebratory, I thought for a moment that maybe we were on their planet, but quickly dismissed the idea. Some voices drift in, delicate and beautiful, but that dissonance, that static, reappears. Towards the end, Balance starts to make some stuttering, hissing noises with his mouth which sound, to be frank, a bit silly; they detract from what's here. Soon after, it ends.
If Mothership is, in fact, a history of whatever planet these beings call home, then "2nd Sun Syndrome" may be more related to the biology of one of these beings. It could be the heartbeat or, perhaps, the engine of the ship. Either way, there is something wrong. Something horrible is about to occur, either an explosion or whatever the aliens' equivalent of a heart attack is, but, before that can happen, the "song" ends. Another possibility, and this is based on the title, is that maybe 2nd Sun Syndrome is some kind of disease. What if what we're hearing is the breaking down of one of these aliens from the inside? What if 2nd Sun Syndrome is why this ship crashed? What if it's the reason these beings needed to escape their planet and have come to ours?
What if it's contagious?
Next is "The Sea Priestess", one of the only tracks with lyrics. The music serves as merely a backdrop for some early human recounting the tale or legend or myth of the Sea Priestess. When I sat down and looked at the words being spoken, I saw this as the story passed down generations from the people that originally discovered the craft on the shoreline all those years ago to their ancestors.

I was woken three times in the night

And asked to watch whales, listen for earthquakes in the sea

I have never seen such a strange sight before

The words also speak of "Egyptian Aztecs arriving from Norway" and how "the men here are dessicated like mummies" and there is an interesting shift in the narrator's voice which might even imply that the speaker is one of these beings, rather than a human encountering one of these beings. Lots of room for interpretation here.
The penultimate track, "I Don't Want To Be The One" sounds so unlike anything else on here that I assumed it was a cover, but then I heard the words and saw that, this too, fits right in.

I don't want to be the one

When everyone is gone

I don't want to be the one

To see so far ahead

I have to live life looking back

To see the skies turn red

I don't want to be the one

To play this dangerous game

To find out why they came

The song itself reminds me of music from Aeon Flux; it's sad, stately and flangey**...until the third verse, when Balance starts shrieking the lyrics.
John...we get it...you don't want to be the one. Yeesh.

The final track, "MU-UR", has two distinct movements: the first two-thirds could be that transmission from "The Avatars" but translated, although not with 100% accuracy as some of the lyrics make utterly no sense while others, "the miraculous image of sound washed ashore", "we feel like babies in the brine" and "God saved me from drowning then kicked me to death on the beach" seem fitting with the overall story. The voice delivering said lyrics is affected and insectile; but also childish and confused. This may be the last of its kind and it's dying. The sound is that of the ship's beating heart, or, possibly, the heart of the speaker. There is a strong sense of hopelessness here that becomes more acute when, as the first part winds down, a looping, limping set of tones begins to cycle, slowly running down, as if the life support is finally, after all these centuries buried under the sand, giving out. Once that system has finally gone silent, the last third of "MU-UR" feels very much like an ascension or a rebirth; the music sounds like crystalline power cells regrowing themselves, but, although the hopeful tones are joined by a high, beautiful voice repeating "the eternal" again and again (the same voice that was heavily affected) in Mothership), the very ending sounds like backup power failing, hope dying, the end of an entire race.
Whether "MU-UR" is meant to be the name of the planet, the ship, the being sharing this message or the being for which this message is intended...we'll never know.

So, a ship crashes on a beach, millions of years ago. There might be survivors of some alien disease on board, or merely a record of what happened and a cry for help. Early humans encountered this ship and made of it what they did, none of them completely understanding what it was or what it implied and, in the end, this race of alien beings died. Listening to this with that story as a framework makes me think that Coil could not have titled this album more aptly. While it's certainly not my favorite album of theirs, Astral Disaster may be one of the most enthralling.

* A title that began to sow these alien seeds in my mind.

** Something about it sounds a bit like Depeche Mode's "Little 15".