Review Summary: Electronic music without the skin.
The breadth of Coil's enduring appeal throughout the underground music scene is rather fascinating. They never really toured until the end of their career, they don't really seem to have a particular "hit" or a signature song, and both Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and John Balance are also associated with another (arguably bigger) group in Throbbing Gristle. Yet here they are, adored and steeped in mythology, possibly the most revered band from a scene that they're sonically pretty distinct from. Trent Reznor was messing around with them at one point, I've seen them pop up in an Ulver music video, Clive Barker was good friends with them, even my American friend from high school that was more into hip-hop, midwest-emo and post-rock had
The Ape of Naples on his harddrive. Though they are certainly not for everyone, it's often quite surprising to see who they end up ticking the box for, and which parts of their discography it is that captivates them.
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is a bit of an oddity, even for a what was decidedly a rather odd band. At some point around the end of the 90s, having shifted the band's allegiance from a solar group to that of a moon group, husbands Christopherson and Balance relocated to Weston-super-Mare---a seaside retirement town in North Somerset, in the only country that would have town names that wacky---and made what is often considered their most enduring work,
Musick to Play in the Dark, vol. 1. The period spanning 1999 to 2000 was very productive, as not only did Coil make a sequel for
Musick, but they also released two other albums in that period which curiously don't seem to get much attention at all, even now that they've recently been reissued by DAIS records in all the formats you could feasably want them on. Those two albums were the hypnotic swelling drone
Queens of the Circulating Library, and this one,
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil.
Now, I really must concede this much, neither album has the same level of general appeal as the two
Musick to Play in the Dark records, especially not this one. This and
Queens… were initially released as limited run CDs packaged in clear and pink c-shell cases, which I distinctly remember some computer games came in around the turn of the millenium. The main impetus for
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil seems to have been a particular setting on Thighpaulsandra's Serge modulator that Christopherson took a shine to (Thighpaulsandra is also considered a member of Coil). The music on
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is not particularly pleasant, though not like the threatening notilucence of the
Musick to Play in the Dark. Rather, it has the kind of hypnotic thrumming a splitting headache on a bad trip has, more likely to appeal to fans of
Time Machines.
It is probably the most evocative of the industrial scene Coil formed out of of any of their records, fixated on pulsing modulating synth patterns that are bent on reminding you that all it is is electricity flowing through wires, channelled, rather than produced. Even the layout of the album is intentionally obtuse, tracks 3 - 5 are actually all just the one song, and the original CD release split "Tunnel of Goats" into 18 arbitrarily divided tracks, with the express purpose of neutering your CD player's shuffle feature. The appeal to
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is in the textured noise of the modulations, ear-splitting and cold, barbed-wire and battery acid. "I am the Green Child" sticks a little closer to the path for most Coil fans and probably will for the casual listener as well. The cold, industrial sounds are a little further in the back and aren't as violent, with the track leaning a little more into the eerie nocturnal motifs heard elsewhere in their moon musick oeurve. The rest of the album is a little harder to sit with and though there is appeal to be found in the nauseousness conjured by
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil's naked voltage, it's also not one I find myself revisiting regularly, as it's hard to say that what it's going for is something I find myself needing often and it finds itself bested by some of Coil's industrial contemporaries.
It must be said that
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is the mark of a group boldly curious about the scope of what electronic music can be. Sure, it's not their most accessible work, but it's proximity to some of the band's more "realised" music is demonstrative of artists seeing beyond limits. Which is probably quite an appropriate way to conceptualize who Coil were and their enduring relationship to underground music.
Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is not a statement album I don't think it would be unfair to say, but it is nonetheless a curiousity worth examining.
