Review Summary: ''The world ended a long time ago; it's moving backwards''
It has become an unpleasant and somehow inevitable habit for one who wishes to talk about Coil to mention the passing away in 2005 of John Balance, the band’s co-funder, singer and songwriter; event which would lead to the release of their masterpiece,
The Ape of Naples (2005), and ultimately put an end to Coil as a band.
The New Backwards (2008) was recorded three years after the death of Balance, fruit of the reunion in studio of the two ex-members that are Peter Christopherson (himself gone in 2010) and Danny Hyde. If the provenance of the material used to record
The New Backwards is not always clear (
The New Backwards refering to a 1993 release called
Backwards which was then renamed multiple times and that shares barely any similarity with the material found on
The New Backwards), it nonetheless serves as a formidable junction between Coil’s early 90’s abrasive industrial era to mid 00’s more electronically oriented sound. Much more than just a mixing of unreleased stuff,
The New Backwards shows itself as giving a clear indication of what Coil is and what is the band’s overall sound and, in this sense, is an essential album for every fan as well as for anyone who has never ever heard Coil and wants to start somewhere with the band.
The listener will find on
The New Backwards a continuation of some of the themes addressed not only on
The Ape of Naples, but also throughout most of Coil’s career: existentialism, death, nihilism and spirituality in the age of modernity. On the second track, Nature is a Language, Balance shrieks words about the relationship between human and nature in an electronically distorted and repeated voice sung over tribal-like percussions, ultimately leading to quoting Fire of The Mind, the opening song on
The Ape of Naples:
‘’Nature is a language
Can the animal see this?
Can’t you read?
Can the animal see this?
It’s a test
Man is the animal’’
Man is an animal. But a very particular kind of animal: an animal, which, through language, is capable of asking questions and questioning itself about its very outmost and ultimate possibility: death. Can animals see death coming in the same way man does? 19th century German-Idealist philosopher F. W. Schelling once wrote:
‘’The anxiety of death pushes the creature outside of his center’’
a phrase 20th century philosopher Heidegger liked to quote when showing how man inevitably transcends itself when confronted with the unsolvable question of the reason of his own being, which alone is enough to leave the immediate and secure state of certainty that today’s modern science desperately tries to reach by explaining the sensible and verifiable world and pretending it is the only realm of existence there is. Only thing is, the meaning and reason of life is not affair of any science. Maybe can art reveal truths about human in a way science will never do?
Apart from Paint Me As a Dead Soul, a dark and beautiful poem in which we hear Balance sing monotonously over a gloomy accordion, the tracks on the album are mostly instrumental and consist of long eerie notes played on synthesizer chopped with electronic breaks that are not without resemblance with Autechre’s
LP5 or with Aphex Twin’s
Drukqs, as it is the case on the first track, Careful What You Wish For. Although Coil’s music on
The New Backwards is way slower and much more industrial and repetitive than Autechre or Aphex Twin’s ‘’IDM’’, the strong acid influences of Coil added to the synthesized melodies conserve the sense of difficult beauty that is found in the two electronic acts. In this way, Coil is not a particularly easy band to get into, as the beauty expressed in their songs, particularly on The New Backwards, is often in relation with the tragic of distortion and breaks.
Originally released by Important Records as part of a 4x LP reissue of
The Ape of Naples,
The New Backwards are the six songs that were produced by Christopherson and Hyde in 2008 and that were added as the fourth LP of the reissue. With such a length, the album can only leave the listener with wanting more. Nonetheless,
The New Backwards is masterfully produced and greatly captures the sound and the meaning of a mythic band with an over 20 years long career, pioneers of the genre. Princess Margaret's Man In The D'Jamalfn, the last track of the record, confirms Coil as being electronic masters in their ability to express a mysterious and uncanny atmosphere through an esoteric Oriental rhythm combined with a grandiose electronic solo. Letting himself being guided by the song’s notes, the listener is free to penetrate through mystic realms of ancient East civilizations and infinite deserts, for Coil’s main force is the never ending source of interpretations that can be given to their poetry and their songs.
Through their experimental, electro-industrial and dark ambient music, often compared with Swans, Coil conveys both the sublime event that is existence and the anguish of modern human condition confronted with the how so proclaimed death of God characterized by the loss of a an original link to divinity, loss that may very well be the destiny of Western civilization, itself lost in its never-ending quest to put nature and humans under the domination of machinery and profitable production. With what is considered by many to be ‘’more than just music’’, the legendary and highly influential band that is Coil reveals the distress of our modern society while never pretending to possess the cure for it. It has been reported that John Balance would have once said: ‘’I hate this world so much that if I weren’t drinking non-stop, I would not be able to deal with it.’’ Can art then and, in this case, music, give meaning to human experience? This could very well be Coil’s answer.
