The Coil Review Project: Wrap Up

Twenty albums (give or take), twenty weeks (give or take), a myriad of thoughts and emotions.
The Coil Review Project is, finally, over.

I have never experienced a band this diverse in their sound. Yeah, a band will try something new or maybe even reinvent themselves, but, if it works at all, it always feels forced or too self aware. With Coil...I had, literally, no idea what was going to happen at the beginning of each album. Of course, like any band that exists for such a long time, there are commonalities, but the way these common threads manifest themselves was, so often, shockingly different.
The light, (their exploration and understanding of) the dark, the spirituality, the sacrilege, the screaming, the silence, the depth...
The utter disregard for the listener.
But never lazy*. It was always carefully orchestrated disdain, more like a direct challenge: we dare you to listen to this, to survive and maybe attempt to understand this.
Or, maybe I'm completely off the target here; maybe the audience wasn't even considered. Maybe they were just creating.
Less "we dare you" and more "oh, sfomeone else is hearing this? Hm."
Did some of their work get self indulgent?
Who can really say?
If they were only making this for themselves, can that even happen?
Perhaps if I get Danny Hyde on my podcast (digressive_obscenity), I can ask him.

Then there's all the influence on Nine Inch Nails.
This project served to shed a lot of light on where Reznor was coming from, on what he drew from, on some of the more dangerous and volatile ingredients of what Nine Inch ails was. I'm only left to wonder what they would have become and what they would have created with Reznor; not just remixes but songs, EPs, albums.
Imagine The Fragile produced by Coil.
Imagine Atticus Ross replaced with John Balance.
Imagine Reznor, Christopherson and Balance scoring The Girl With The Dragon
Tattoo.
The mind runs rampant...

And, finally, the ability their music has to change a space, be it a snow covered, tree lined street or Times Square at rush hour. I found myself feeling almost instant menace and unease thanks solely to the sounds I was hearing. It was fantastic and I've never experienced anything quite like it. I can't think of a "band" adept at transforming an environment and infusing it with such emotions.
Throughout my time with Coil, I kept thinking what if more composers tried their approach when it came to scoring horror movies? Then I kept answering myself: there would be better horror movies.

The tops and the bottoms:

Favorite Albums (no particular order):
The Remote Viewer (some of the richest instrumental music I've ever heard)
The Ape of Naples (the perfect sonic evolution of Coil's sound)
Moon's Milk (In Four Phases) (the extremes that were visited here, the quality of sound and emotional depths...)

Least Favorite Albums (no particular order):
ANS (in no world did this need to be three and a half god damn, motherfucking, cocksucking hours long)
Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil (can't help be feel as if I was being mocked by simply listening to this)
The New Backwards (sounds like a bag of chewed up and forgotten bones...like, in a bad way)

Anyway, I'll stop now.
Thanks to everyone who actually read these...I think there were six of you and three of you were Russian.

Please stay tuned for my Prince Review Project.**


A quick note on the bits and pieces that I did not review.

Gold Is The Metal With The Broadest Shoulders and Stolen & Contaminated Songs (because they are mostly collections of demos or alternate versions of songs and were not released as albums)

The Angelic Conversations (because it's not about Coil, not primarily anyway. Their music serves as a background over which Judi Dench reads erotic Shakespeare sonnets. If they had written the sonnets, this would be on the list, but, as they didn't, it did not make the cut)

Unnatural History I, II & III (because these are just collections of scraps and musical falderal, without context or placement)

How To Destroy Angels (Remixes & Re-Recordings (because fuck you if you think I'm going to listen to a 7-track album consisting of remixes of a sixteen minute prank. Fuck you twice, in fact.)

Any of the live CDs or "best ofs" (again, not really albums)

I'm not saying that I didn't listen to these, just that I chose not to review them.





* Well...maybe a few times...

** No.