SCATOLOGY

Well, well, well.. look who's finally appeared... Let me introduce you to Coil. Clearly the dirtiest, filthiest pair of characters in the music industry. Comprising Pete Christopherson - electronic percussionist of 'Throbbing Gristle' and John Balance, one time groupie of fat lipped, big breasted Genesis P Orridge of said band. 'Scatology' is their initial recording from '84 and it's a nasty, smelly thing which will leave you desperate for a shower after listening.

Split between studio recorded professionalism and instrumentals 'Scatology adds up to a strangely colourful and very listenable album.

It's all pretty gross and perverted. Primitive sampling is used to good effect on the opener 'Ubu Noir' which is based on a play by Alfred Jarry written in 1896 called 'Ubu Roi', where Jarry satirises power, greed, and evil practices.

Somehow Coil were rich enough to get hold of a 'Fairlight CMI' for this recording which is surprising, because these things cost an arm and a leg back then.

'Panic' has sampling by Jim Thirlwell of 'Scraping Foetus off the Wheel' as John Balance shows a dramatic range of demented vocals. I really miss the shouty John Balance of earlier years.

Some misery follows with 'At The Heart Of It All' with wailing horns and a plodding piano which suddenly stabs at the heart making this the most miserable of tunes.

'The Tenderness of Wolves' has Gavin Friday of 'Virgin Prunes' singing a distressed and mournful little tune replete with 'Fairlight' backing track that is for once not cheesy, but has a disturbing crying baby over a Yamaha DX7, and a wailing Stephen Thrower clarinet. Ugly stuff indeed and not one to play at work folks.

'The Spoiler' is much more like it, being continually on the brink of madness with John balance sounds frenzied as he delivers some truly frantic and erratic vocals as a huge electronic drumbeat thumps in the foreground. Lots of dirty shrieks and electronic mumblings occur in the background all the while.

Restless Day' is a bit more straightforward, although the howling guitars and bendy electronics lend a certain queasiness to John Balances oddly treated vocals, on this, the most tuneful of recordings present.

The little oddity 'Clap' follows which has a funny horn thing going on amongst the drum machine as a breaking glass ends proceedings.

The floaty little piece named 'Aqua Regis is a three minute tune of gurgles and scratches as an imaginary U-Boat sinks to its watery grave.

This sets everything up perfectly for the confrontational and fight-to-the-death 'Solar Lodge' with its looped hammering drum machine, desperate vocals and distorted electric guitar cascading about wildly. The guitar sounds are super in their almost 'Goth' like style.

The 'SWBP' is where things take something of a downturn for me. Not so much as how it sounds but in what's actually going on... The SWBP is an acronym for 'The Sewage Workers Birthday Party' and it sounds truly gross. Full of ambient guitar feedback, but also full of rubber gloved slushing sounds which stretch and ping like elastic as some dirty guy does stuff I don't even want to imagine. Unfortunately I'm forced to imagine for the next three minutes which is what downgrades this album markedly. I just can't be doing with that stuff man...

Mercifully 'Godhead=Deathead' pulls me out of these degenerate thoughts, and I'm assaulted by super crystal clear drum machine and totally off-kilter, crazed vocals instead. Like all Coil songs, they have meaning and depth - this one being about the drug 'Erot Rye Mould', which is found growing parasitically on grain and when baked into bread was responsible for St Anthony's Fire in the Middle Ages. Well you did ask didn't' you?.

'Scatology' is very experimental, but overly gloomy in parts, none more so than in the last track 'Cathedral in Flames' - which has some seriously doom laden moods going down with some very heavy electronic drums and also has the unforgettable 'Tarot' vocal line 'Paradise stands in the Shadow of Swords'. It's supposedly about the Marquis de Sade which ends with an overblown blast of electronic sound that's enough to give you heart failure. No really it is! It's SO loud!

Unfortunately, there's a horrid version of 'Tainted Love' by Soft Cell tagged on at the end which doesn't fit well at all due to its downbeat dreariness.

Whilst not as accomplished and refined as 'Horse Rotorvator', this stands alone in their discography, where the ghosts of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV linger amongst the deaths of the two protagonists who produced some of the most remarkable music of recent times.

Although COIL was a full-fledged group of sorts throughout its 30 plus year history, it was basically a duo at the core who controlled every decision regarding anything to do with the band. This duo was John Balance and Peter Christopherson. They in fact they had worked together for a while before they formed COIL but when Christopherson decided to leave behind his work with Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV the two began releasing albums under the name COIL.

On this debut release SCATOLOGY we hear what COIL were masters at. Starting with the very first track "Ubu Noir" they would take samples of different instruments, sound effects, vocalizations and create a dark, depressing and foreboding loop of sound that pulsates like a jellyfish propelling itself through the viscosity of the ocean's salt water. This album is filled with these melancholic pieces that mesmerise the listener by creating a sonic journey into some strange alien world where little is familiar and nothing is friendly.

Only in the very beginning of their discography do we hear more industrial sounding tracks like "Panic" or "Spoiler" which sound more like Skinny Puppy than any of the majority of future releases of COIL. These are the tracks that I tend to dislike as they just don't seem to fit in with the rest and create a lopsided effect for the album as a whole. The real surprise on this album is the closer "Tainted Love" which is a remake of the famous one-hit wonder Soft Cell, which isn't bad by any means but still seems out of place compared with the ambiance and industrial soundscapes that the rest of the album has to offer. Another factor that separates the early releases from the later is that we get actual sung vocals on a few of the tracks.

This is not my favorite COIL album and over the years of listening to the majority of their canon I have probably listened to this album the least but as i'm sitting here writing this review and listening to it I have to say that it is not a bad album at all. Uneven? Yes, but strangely charming and an interesting insight into the origins of these guys who would go on to create gradually more complex and sinister sounding ambient soundscapes that are beyond bizarre. I would say this is the perfect place for anyone wanting to explore their vast body of work to begin as their music only becomes stranger and stranger until at times it doesn't seem like music at all.

Balance and Christopherson's first album under the Coil name rather exists under the shadow of Psychic TV, which the duo had both contributed to prior to forming Coil. (Indeed, some editions include a cover of Tainted Love, linked to Psychic TV via the Marc Almond connection.) What you get is essentially a trip into synthesised industrial weirdness that's not too far off from what Psychic TV were doing at the time. Subsequent Coil releases would find them asserting their own distinct identity more, but this isn't without its grimy, leering charms and is worth a listen for anyone who wants to trace their musical development from their Psychic TV days.

After short stints in Psychic TV and the lesser known Zos Kia, Coil co-founder John Balance absconded off with lover Peter Christopherson to focus on Coil. This early release is a jumble of rage and ideas musically and lyrically. Weird, squelchy ambient and twisted, thumping Industrial, musically; and rage at the aids epidemic, Christianity and some plain old perversity for good measure, lyrically.

Ubu Noir is a short opening to the album, a handful of samples toyed around with, some woodwinds cut and mixed amongst some voices and what sounds like paper being ripped. After this little warm up, Panic starts as stuttering and stumbling quasi danceable (if you were having a seizure) industrial track, anchored by electronic drums and bass, allowing all manner of samples, guitar feedback, and Balance's shouted vocals to wreak havoc, it puts me in mind of a handful of Current 93's attempts at more 'commercial' oriented Industrial. Balances' notes on the song go on about psychic surgery and reverse death and the beginning of the world, but the lyrics can also be seen as allusions to how gay culture was and still can be perceived, 'Anything will be alright, If you come out in the night'. At The Heart Of It All is a much more somber, apocalyptic affair, synth lines slowly twinkle in the background, accompanied with mournful, plodding piano and soon to be full time member Stephen Thrower's howling grief stricken Clarinet playing. Tenderness Of Wolves starts with dark, clanging synth lines, coalescing more odd features; what sounds like a distorted, sampled sound of a baby crying, acoustic guitar and pan pipes. Gavin Friday provides some demented, crooning guest vocals here. Hard to tell if the lyrics are about lovers or vampires, or both. Spoiler returns to somewhat similar industrial stomping grounds of Panic; a dash of tribal, staccato drums and samples of horns form backbone for flauting pan pipes, snatches of guitar noise, and almost comical carnivalesque keyboard intrusions. Vocals are a mixture of sung and croaked, mostly being the word 'Spoiler'. Clap is a short uncomfortable Industrial intrusion, a squeal of guitar and glass shattering leads into a panicked and nervous synth line, swelling synths culminate in a burn out, before reforming shortly and burning out again. Liner notes contain treatment methods for the clap (slang for gonorrhea). An appropriately agitated song for a pertinent and sad time for many people involved with this group, and the anger and agitation only increases during side B.

The CD reissues of Scatology feature some extra songs stuffed after the original A side ending, Restless Day and Aqua Regis as well as Tainted Love, tacked on the end. Restless Day has a strong and driving rhythmic structure of drums, bass, and synth; quaint almost naïve vocals sing song about what I interpret as depression, while various multi-tracked guitar noises slowly crumble in. There's a percussive sound effect throughout the whole song sounding like a ticking clock, maybe hand in hand with lyrics seemingly about the drudgery of everyday life. Aqua Regis starts with some creepy toy piano, before switching gears into a soundscape of a darkened, hellish factory. Far away rumblings and thumpings, clanging and reverberating. Saws and gears grinding and whirring.

This song works very well at leading us back into the original track listing with Solar Lodge. Industrial rhythms and hopeless, wailing clarinet compete for dominance with near unhinged vocals from John Balance. Underneath all this is floating, droning, and warbled bass guitar, much like the subterranean river mentioned in the liner notes, from a quote attributed to Charles Manson about finding a bottomless hole out in the Californian desert, leading to an underground, North flowing river. Bottomless because "where could a river be going North underground?", conjecturing "How many people could you hide down this hole?". The title Solar Lodge is a reference to the Californian based, mid 60s cult/magical order of same name, perhaps most infamous for the case of child abuse stemming from a raid of their ranch, finding a six-year-old boy chained inside a box left in out in the desert. Black sun rising indeed as we spiral further down this path of daylight nightmare into The Sewage Worker's Birthday Party, the liner notes referencing a story in a Swedish S&M magazine and also fulfilling the title of this album. The song itself is one of the more minimal, bass guitar woozily droning and scratching along, uncomfortable rhythmic background squelching, and a singular, persistent, unerring machine thumping loathsomely in the depths of this awful place. It also contains snatches of private and intimate recordings made by Peter Christopherson for added unsavoriness.

Godhead≈Deathead opens with unidentified sounds, but plasticky and latex-y and icky. Quickly we move into a martial industrial beat, various refreshingly whimsical percussive accoutrements accompany militaristic yelled vocals, a mid-song pace change for a slower gothic feel, proto Dungeon Synth. It's cheesy sounding, but I kinda love it. Lyrically we have not moved into the whimsical, here being a takedown of Christianity, liner notes referencing St. Anthony's Fire or Ergot, a fungus that grows on grain and causes convulsions, hallucinations, and rot; being responsible for multiple epidemics during the middle ages. I take the title of the song, Godhead≈Deathead, as dig at the act of communion, bread being a symbol for Jesus' body, yet causing mass poisoning if infected bread is consumed. The next song Cathedral In Flames continues the Christianity battering; the Marquis De Sade, the York Minster fire of July 9, 1984, and the Hadith being lyrically mixed into a seeming ritual induction. It's also the weakest of the album, very similar to the previous song, and far cheesier. Off putting sampled trumpets, stumbling drums, odd cohesion and lots space between sounds, and Balance's nasally vocals don't work for me. Ending the CD rerelease on a better note is a cover of Soft Cell's Tainted Love, Coil opting for much slower, minimal, and somber approach. Balance delivers some beautiful, wistful half sung vocals; synths ringing and floating along, pealing like electronic church bells, echoing Coil's unhappiness of then and still current affairs.