Moon’s milk was flowing strong with Coil’s transition from London to the Weston-lands. An eerie musicality crept over them on 1999’s Musick To Play In The Dark as future and past co-existed, the altar of white rainbows and unquiet skulls soaked up the coastal mists of their new shoreline residence, the tidal purr no doubt whispering new secrets into Jhon Balance‘s ear.
A dark and immersive path, this originally subscription-only release threw wide open in the gloomy sit up and listen symphonics of its opener, “Are You Shivering?”, the crackly drip-drop of its outer halo leading to the central glow of Balance’s lucid voice surfing that bassy plunge-pool, a darkened oval to tumble into as MDMA come-downs mingle with the alchemic and words luminously spider.
This was a symbiotic shimmer, after which the following “Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night’ was a genuine shock (in a good way). A instrumental explosion of prog-like adrenalins and needling melodics that reduced Balance’s amazing voice to fracturing glimpses buried deep within the wormholing incandescence of Thighpaulsandra‘s rite of spring. A glance back to Love’s Secret Domain perhaps, but with a sharpened / incising focus that was exhilarating / exfoliating, its noisy congeals a prelude to the Constant Shallowness explorations to come. The ill-electrical insects and pitch-shifted elves of “Red Queen” return us to a darkness in which Balance’s lyrics corrode beautifully, words that shuffle languidly in a waltz-like encirclement / embrace. The distorted histories and hidden truths of the narrative bending in Sleazy’s effect-smeared mirrors, undercut by this pulsing motif that sucks at you like Weston-super-Mare’s waterlogged sands overshot with Parisian-pinned accents and the odd jazzy whisk, Balance’s voice séance-doubling its haunting demise.Then there’s “Broccoli” too, stripping the branches back to reveal something spectral. A rice-crispy skip’n’pop enfolded by eerie operatics and murmuring key-changes. Peter’s gentle off-key vocals (a Coil first) introducing then slipping under the song’s main feast while Balance’s voice is hypnotically inviting, full of portent, weaving themes of death / rebirth / politeness and cancer-killing antioxidants. “By working the soil / we cultivate the sky”, he prophesies as ancestral shadows thread round his words, the stuff winter evenings seem made for.
A golden thread that frays on “Strange Birds”’ abstracting shapes in a canopy of lop/ lop weirdings, replete with dog barks and visitations that provide an odd interlude leading to the album’s last offering, where the tunefully somnambulant washes of “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” cerebrally shoal, its gasping gossamers backdropping another centrepiece for Balance’s voice. The closest Coil ever came to a ballad, the pagan pull of those words subtly shining, inventing landscapes, weaving the mythological with the biological, lyrically nursing the loss the thief of consciousness will eventually rob us of.A beautifully intimate experience that still feels like a new discovery all these years later, Musick To Play In The Dark has a sound that lives beyond its six-track confines to bleed eternal. If you buy anything by Coil, this Dais Records re-release will definitely sow the seeds of an addiction to come.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
