the unraveling

Coil - The New Backwards

March 9, 2008 on 5:30 pm | In music | No Comments

My shiny new Red Vinyl arrived today! bravo to Important Records for a gorgeous package, and thanks to Coil for finally giving us this musical gift. The New Backwards sounds like a missing transitional link between LSD and Coil’s later work, but is also much more refined than the early demos for backwards. The first track, “Careful What You Wish For” opens with clicky beats and filter swept synths that remind me a little of early Autechre. The song evolves slowly with processed vocals intoning the mantra “God Please Fuck My Mind For Good” while digitally manipulated drums and basses squirm in the background. “Nature Is A Language” features wildly manipulated and pitch twisted vocals from the late Jhonn Balance, with a great synth melody and some jazzy drum and bass loops… it shadows lyrics from Fire of the Mind (Man is the Animal) and is probably my favorite track on the LP at the moment. Last on side A is “Algerian Basses”, an instrumental of processed grooves, which seems to have a Danny Hyde stamp on it and conjures images of banks of turntables with locked grooves all spitting out sound furiously during an earthquake. If you listen closely you can hear bits of the original “Egyptian Basses” which I assume made up the source material. Copacabbala has some great vocals, with Jhonn singing “I am the most accomplished surgeon of moral deformity” with spoken word that harkens back to LSD. It also has a nice melancholic synth melody. The psychotropic sound field of “Paint me as a dead soul” has a nightmarish orchestra of music box loops, deformed piano, and what sounds like percussion loops twisted and dropped down an abandoned mine shaft that is starting to fall in. Really cool. The last track, “Princess Margaret’s Man in the D’Jamalfna” is most recognizable from the backwards demos (Crumb of Time I think), and has a dark trip hop groove and some really fucked up mute trumpet. All in all, it’s another great Coil release and a perfect complement to “Ape of Naples” as it adds another, perhaps more energetic dimension to the dark set of songs that was surely influenced by Balance’s death in it’s final mix and song sequencing. In any case, I highly recommend you order it now if you haven’t already, as I understand there are very few left…   Important Records - The New Backwards