Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil
Dais
As Coil albums go, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil is an assault on the senses, as was the first time I saw them live. “Persistence is all” couldn’t have been a better expression of the fact, that skin-shredding noise / strobe fest of a finale still scars me with satisfaction twenty-two years later.
The purring magnitude of “Higher Beings Command” is a winning opener that eases you in gently – an ominous and glitchy affair sonically seeking an extraterrestrial audience. A tonal séance rippling from beyond, snagging an esoteric sweetness that bleeds into the marimba-pointed spine and whirr-cut synth of “I Am The Green Child”. A track that shifts the focus from abstract to song-form, sees Jhonn Balance’s FX-altered vox staking a muggy Madagascar night, white eyes in a tangle of black roots like a witchdoctor in a halo of blue sparking cicada circuits.
An atmospherically arrowed cocktail besieged in squeal and spontaneous laughter, a playground that cerebrally hooks, conjures or obscures. Mantra-splashing colour / sound / oblivion, swimming in a sea of occidental vomit or musing the cybernetic union with the flowing vein, a cursive chemistry that’s finally thrown into a canopy of nocturnal cries. A signal for the next phase, a noise-filled exodus, hypnotically cutting in there with the electrified buzz of “Beige”, undulating your hemispheres in grainy respiration. A drone that seems to possess free will, channel-shift, then mutate seamlessly into the “Lowest Common Abominator”’s throbbing cortex. The track’s cocooning ripples irrigating the daggering devotionals of “Free Base Chakra”, a malleable precursor to the cathartic cleanse to come.A twenty-seven-minute exorcism that is “Tunnel Of Goats”, a nauseating explosion jumbling your skull in scribbling rawness, purposeful brutality jolting you out of the anaesthesia of the present. An ugly freshness I like to dial up there in the red, let leak into that steady gristled throb that overtakes it. A meditative maul that sucks you within itself, suddenly erupting in an unexpected vocal morsel.
An equinox shiver-inducing prayer in which beauty and death inter-twine, finds Balance chanting into the aether like a shamanic shapeshifter mirrored in recoiling reverb, a brief oasis that sparrows back into the circulating continuum that finally terminates in sudden silence, and a choice reward for your endurance — mocking laughter.Selvaggina, Go Back Into The Woods
Retractor
Selvaggina, Go Back Into The Woods saw Coil in creative renewal for a fresh tour with new material; man, those were heady days, I can tell you, those Black Antlers demos quickly leaking worldwide, whetting your appetite to experience for yourself.
And what an amazing series start it is too; this soundboard recording is something special, sees Coil embracing a jaded romanticism, full of warm acoustics and errant electronics. The grimoire scribblings of the cover don’t begin to describe the wicked sense of songcraft on offer or the spontaneous magic leaping those speakers.
A weird little germ of a track kick-starts things with a major rework of their creepy People Like Us contribution. “The Gimp / Sometimes” is a ghostly rotisserie coughing and spluttering into a crooked hat of a melody, tangling itself up with a steady rhythmic pluck of double bass and those squeally electronics that splash Jackson Pollock-like, Balance caught in its gravity, embracing an uncomfortable truth. Self-harm / -loathing, the destructive creative plaintively venting, yelling over this wavering baroque, its open sense of frustration pulled into sharp contrast by what I’d call one of Coil’s best late period realisations.An easy-eared slippery fish by the name of “Sex With Sun-Ra” is pebbled by a journeying synth and marimba hollows, holding imaginary court with the said visionary, fraying into some delicious excess. Some crazy sense of perfection clandestine candled into “All the Pretty Little Horses” dialling it all back, simplifying things, a nod to Coil’s extended family dribbling off into the insect-like chirrups of “The Tattooed Man”. A tune half-lit in Parisian accordion re-stitching Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man with a multi-layered stretchy melodic spurring in noisy interference, that hollow percussive pin-boarding the lyrics baffling dualities.
Loving the decanted decadence on show here, the performer banter too. The amber has set but it’s still reactive, flies in there with sweet satisfaction. The percussively rounded “Teenage Lightning” a succulent, shimmering ballpoint of a track, that broken melody half-moon curve and its splatter-gunned spirals. The mysterious mellowness of “Wraiths And Strays” a blur of Thai to a dotted-line illumination, its increased tempo bringing on rain-soaked beats and a hay-fevered Balance sneezing out vocal abstractions.A chilled candour that tiptoes into the Mary Poppins-fuelled banger “Black Antlers” repeatedly questioning “Where’s your child?”, pulsating with implausibles, viciously skewered and finally basking in the heat of audience approval. The hearth-glow of Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang” that follows seeming almost pedestrian in comparison, all straight-cut and tumbling. A brief interlude before diving into the autumnal donations of “Amethyst Deceivers” that pull the curtains down, showman style.
As far as live recordings is concerned, this is an absolute gem.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
