Coil Albums (18)
What The Critics Say
Available only on dates of Coil's Even an Evil Fatigue tour in 2004, Black Antlers is a stopgap release that consists of early studio and live versions of songs that were being worked on for the next official studio album. Due to John Balance's accidental death, most of the tracks on Black Antlers would become final yet unpolished versions. Sounding particularly unfinished is the opener, "The Gimp (Sometimes)," a ballad that never quite comes together over its 11 minutes, failing to mesh the dark, ambient instrumentation with Balance's beautiful and haunting vocals. The second track, however, "Sex with Sun Ra (Part One: Saturnalia)" is a classic late-period Coil track. Balance intones a fictional tale of a conversation between himself and the free jazz legend over a pulsating backing track punctuated by bell tones and sparse industrial percussion. "Wraiths and Strays (From Montreal)" is the highlight of the album, a twisting, slithering, pulsating beast of a track that interleaves Thighpaulsandra's keyboards with Balance's cut-up vocals to hallucinatory effect. As the tempo of the piece increases, the percussion becomes more frenetic and varied, the background squiggles become more aggressive, and the song sounds like it is chasing the listener down a dark alley. It is worth noting for the budget-minded fan that Black Antlers shares all of its track listing with another Coil release, Selvaggina, Go Back into the Woods, and the live versions on that album are for the most part the superior. While there are some excellent songs on this album, on the whole, Black Antlers doesn't make an appropriate introduction for the uninitiated. For the faithful though, this is a near-great effort from the sorely missed group of alchemists who called themselves Coil. Note: Once the initial and second pressings of this album sold out, it was made available for digital download through the band's website, www.thresholdhouse.com. ~ James Mason, All Music Guide
'...And the Ambulance Died in His Arms'
Release Date 1/1/2005
Tracks 5
Label Threshold House
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What The Critics Say
...And the Ambulance Died in His Arms is a live recording of Coil performing at the 2003 All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Camber Sands. On this date, Coil were John Balance on vocals, Peter Christopherson on sequencers, Thighpaulsandra on keyboards, and Tom Edwards on marimba. This combination of musicians appeared on Live Two, recorded two years earlier. Where that set was abrasive and loud, this one is largely subdued, very different from the other recordings of Coil that appeared over the course of the Live series. Balance takes the mic to explain the subdued nature of the material, "We're doing a quiet set today. We've had too much shouting over the past year." Of the five lengthy tracks, four are completely new and one is a radical reworking of "The Dreamer Is Still Asleep" from Musick to Play in the Dark. Most of the set appears to be improvised, especially the glossaholalic "Snow Falls on Military Temples'" and "Triple Sons and the Ones You Bury," where Balance appears to be channeling his lyrics from another plane, suggesting phrases and then settling in on one which gets repeated and morphed into something totally new. Most of the song titles on this album are generated from those very phrases. Of all the live Coil albums that have been released, and there are a lot of them, ...And the Ambulance is one of the more satisfying. It is an excellent document of Coil's improvisatory nature, a side that was not displayed on their studio albums much, if at all. ~ James Mason, All Music Guide
'The Ape of Naples'
Release Date 1/1/2005
Tracks 11
Label Threshold House
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What The Critics Say
Listening to The Ape of Naples is a bittersweet experience. As the last album recorded during John Balance's lifetime, it serves as a final statement and summation of the band's multi-faceted career. Naples is much more of a "classic"-sounding Coil album (in the vein of Love's Secret Domain and Musick to Play in the Dark, Vol. 1) than more recent outings (such as ANS, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, or Astral Disaster). Ape is made up of recording sessions that date back to the mid-'90s, recordings done for Trent Reznor's nothing label, and more recent works that were still getting worked out in a live environment ("Triple Sun," "Tattooed Man"). Balance and Peter Christopherson are joined by the likes of Danny Hyde, Thighpaulsandra, Ossian Brown, Cliff Stapleton, and Mike Yorke, depending on the track. Which would lead one to the assumption that the album would sound disjointed, with a rotating cast of characters involved. The magic of Coil is that the album flows as smoothly as it does, not as if it were pieced together over the years and with different collaborators. The focus of the album seems to be (perhaps consciously, perhaps not) on Balance's beautiful and expressive voice. All tracks feature his vocals, notably the industro-goth of "Heaven's Blade," the twisted circus atmospheres of "Tattooed Man," and quite possibly the saddest song Coil ever recorded, a cover of BBC favorite Are You Being Served's theme song, "Going Up." This last is a highlight in the Coil catalog, with Balance duetting with Francois Testroy, telling the listener that "it just is." The painful acceptance of this line encapsulates the experience of the album -- Balance is gone, we must move on and continue. The Ape of Naples is one of Coil's best albums and one of the best albums of 2005. ~ James Mason, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Coil avoided playing live for so much of their life that many fans had given up on the possibility of seeing them perform in public. That all changed in 2001, and Coil released a series of four concert recordings, documenting the evolution of the live Coil experience. Live Four, recorded in Prague and Vienna in 2002, features the best sound quality of the series, and a compelling performance from John Balance, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra, and Ossian Brown, also known as Ossian Sex Shop. The album begins with a one-two punch: the incantatory "I Am Angie Bowie (Sine Waves)" leading into "Last Rites of Spring," which is filled with creepy synths, lurching and glowering like a malevolent spirit finally made flesh. The piece rotates around itself, never really seeming to progress, but constantly is turning in on itself. "Are You Shivering?" continues the creepy synth vibe, descending violins or hurdy-gurdies channeling the spirit of Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard. The highlight of the concert is "Amethyst Deceivers." It has a spacy atmosphere, all bouncing-ball bass and tinkling piano. Ossian's hurdy-gurdy also plays in well on the track, directly leading to the climax of the piece. And surprisingly, they do a spectacularly moving cover version of "Bang Bang," written by Sonny Bono and sung most memorably in a previous version by Nancy Sinatra. This album is a highlight not only of the Live series, but also of the Coil catalog. ~ James Mason, All Music Guide
'Queens of the Circulating Library'
Release Date 4/20/2000
Tracks 1
Label World
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What The Critics Say
On this limited-edition CD, packaged in a pink C-shell with no other inserts, Coil is stripped down to just John Balance and Thighpaulsandra, with the addition of Dorothy Lewis, a retired opera singer and Thighpaulsandra's mother who adds some spoken word material written by Balance. Released on Mother's Day and dedicated to mothers everywhere, Queens of the Circulating Library represents a lighter, softer version of Coil. The single 50-minute track starts off with Lewis' voice speaking about the wonders of libraries, books, knowledge, and trees over some warm, ambient drones. Loops of her voice become electronically manipulated to add some weird textures to the drones, but even these fade out about a quarter of the way in, and the remainder of the disc drifts off in the shifting drones until it finally fades into silence at the end. The analog synths lend the piece a very organic sound that is quite similar to the early albums of Klaus Schulze and other kosmische music and less like Coil's previous work, ambient or otherwise. Though the music is very relaxed, there's enough variation, especially one moment in the middle where it gets tweaked out with what almost sounds like laser gun bursts, which keeps it from sinking into ambient wallpaper. Not your typical Coil album, but certainly an interesting release nonetheless. ~ Rolf Semprebon, All Music Guide
'Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil'
Release Date 1/1/2000
Tracks 6
Label Eskaton
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What The Critics Say
A sly and nasty riposte to domestication, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is a bloody-minded record, at times sounding like a cattle-prod surge delivered directly to the spine. A stocktaking of the previous four decades of outsider blare -- from La Monte Young, to Metal Machine Music, to even the earliest Butthole Surfers -- Coil soils their pawn-shop electronics in blood and sweat, a muscular return to industrial roots. The nominal normal track, "I Am the Green Child," stumbles along like Krautrock coupled with the Exorcist soundtrack. Singer John Balance intones a pretentious and portentous text, voice almost drown in a thick gauze of processing. After this wheezing discourse crawls to a halt, several tracks follow like the lament of a dying washing machine. Finally, in a curious silence thrown into even sharper relief by what follows, Balance sings a few more lines about death and all hell breaks loose, a torrential downpour of upended machine jabber. From the opening of gallows sine waves to the final 16 minutes of revolving noise loops, Coil are implacably devoted to proving their aphorism "persistence is all." ~ Jess Harvell, All Music Guide
'Musick to Play in the Dark 2'
Release Date 1/1/2000
Tracks 7
Label Chalice
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'Musick to Play in the Dark'
Release Date 1/1/1999
Tracks 6
Label Chalice
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What The Critics Say
From the opening pairing of "Are You Shivering?" and the gorgeously titled "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night," it's apparent that Coil was making a return during 1999 that would prove to be as influential on the post-industrial scene as its 1984 debut, Scatology. The group never really went away in the ensuing period, of course, but had maintained a cult status underground for the better part of the '90s. The duo consistently produced stunning albums, but the recordings were often in scarce limited editions that usually reached only hardcore fans. The Musick to Play in the Dark CD and LP were available through mail order only, and featured the core duo of Peter Christopherson and John Balance joined by collaborator Thighpaulsandra. The CD is the first full-length album Coil released on its own Chalice label as a subscription only release. Later in 2000, the album was thankfully re-pressed by Word Serpent, assuring wider availability. The album is a masterpiece of the caliber of the classic '80s trilogy Scatology, Horse Rotovator, and Loves Secret Domain, which gave Coil the highest stature in the post-industrial music scene as one of the most inventive, original, and courageous groups of the genre. Musick to Play in the Dark is an utterly mesmerizing work, and is nothing short of brilliant. The album's scope takes in the music of the '90s, the bleak digital processing and glitch music (Oval, Coh, and Nurse With Wound all spring to mind), but here these often sterile sounds are married to a human warmth that is inimitable Coil -- a sound that carries through the group's career as one of the most distinctive in the post-industrial canon. Along with the essential Coil '80s recordings, Musick to Play in the Dark cannot be recommended highly enough. It represents a chapter in British music that goes beyond the term industrial and into untapped realms of experimentation that place Coil, along with Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, among the '90s British groups more deserving of attention than their obscurity may ever permit. ~ Skip Jansen, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Although Time Machines wasn't precisely credited to Coil, upon its arrival in early 1998 the CD was the first full-length of new material Balance, Christophersen, et al., released in nearly seven years. An hour-long meditation on drone ostensibly inspired by the psychophenomenological properties of hallucinogenic drugs, Time Machines is constructed entirely from cycling, oscillating synth tones, and continues in the vein of shapeless experimentalism established with Black Light District and Worship the Glitch. Enjoyable, if a mite limited in scope. ~ Sean Cooper, All Music Guide
