Coil
Black Antlers

Could anything ever go wrong from the hands of Peter Christopherson? Could the voice of John Balance ever fail to move? Obviously not.

Given this premise, even a posthumous album like “Black Antlers”, an incomplete and reworked draft of what would have been the last work produced by the Coil, could only be something wonderful.

Released in an abbreviated version in the spring of 2004, and then reissued in 2006 in an expanded form and accompanied by a second mini-CD, “Black Antlers” carries forward the word of a band dead and buried, whose artistic journey was forcibly stopped following the dramatic and premature death of the vocalist: a sudden interrupted coitus that fortunately produced one last long ejaculation on the belly of the post-industrial landscape.

Unreleased material fed to famished fans hungry for news? Not even in a dream! And if an album like “Ape of Naples” from 2005, more focused on Balance's voice, sounds, despite its beauty, like a heartfelt tribute from Christopherson to the deceased and beloved companion, this “Black Antlers” emerges more properly as COIL. In short, if “Ape of Naples” remains a nostalgia operation in which it is permissible to shed copious tears for the immense artistic loss that accidental death caused, in “Black Antlers” the thought that forcefully comes to mind is more simply “what kind of badass were the Coil!”.

Balance's voice is obviously present, but not as overwhelming as in the other work, while ample space is given to the electronic excursions of the skillful Christopherson, supported by what were the key figures of the last phase of the band's career, Danny Hyde and Thigpaulsandra in primis. Particularly in the second CD, written and produced by Christopherson and Hyde together, Hyde's influence can be felt: two practically instrumental tracks for about eighteen minutes of frantic techno in perfect Coil style, as we love to remember them in the 1991 masterpiece “Love's Secret Domain”.

But let's focus on the first CD, which constitutes the substantial body of this release: seven tracks for nearly an hour in length that mark a further development in what would have been the Coil's journey.

Starting from the four EPs “Moon's Milk” of 1998, and thus with the entrance into the lineup of the keyboardist Thigpaulsandra, the British duo's path had taken a precise direction, transforming into a sound flow that preferred to leave behind the industrial roughness of their beginnings, to assume a more mature and meditative form, a deviation in the sign of the liquefaction and dilation of sounds and structures, a sort of dark-esoteric-ambient space (“lunar” we could specify) that would have led to the two splendid chapters of “Musick to Play in the Dark”.

"Black Antlers" has therefore been its natural epilogue: what emerges is that the Coil were already beyond any possible definition.

Take for example the ten minutes of the opener “The Gimp (Sometimes)”, a cosmic excursion already pervaded by those jazzy moods that for some time seemed to swirl in the master Christopherson's head (and that will find further development in the superlative “The Endless Not” of the revived Throbbing Gristle). Balance's voice is obviously a croak that exudes disease and perversion in every nuance: a somewhat makeshift contribution, to tell the truth, since it appears in the sixth minute and spreads freely and persistently over a tune deliberately prolonged to infinity, an ideal platform to give ease to Balance's ghost, free to revel without any limit.

This, gentlemen, is not industrial. Just as the subsequent “Sex with Sun Ra” is not industrial, a true masterpiece of the album. Here voice and electronic textures blend much better: Balance's spoken word dives perfectly into the minimal-techno pulse of the track, enriched at the end by marimba strummings, an instrument Christopherson seems to have fallen in love with in later life, perhaps tired of the coldness of the machines he himself helped to popularize (unmissable the reprise “Sex with Sun Ra – part two”, found in the new version of the album, called to rework in an even more hallucinogenic and exotic(er)ic way the track just described).

The post-production work, however, (and understandably) becomes heavy in more than one instance. For example, it is evident how in “The Wraiths and Strays of Paris”, the third monumental track, Balance’s growls are an adornment added at a later time; yet the piece remains a great piece, especially when a powerful rhythmic thrust bursts in at the end, giving vigor to an album that seems to focus mainly on the atmosphere and the evocative power of Balance's mystical speech.

The perhaps most poignant moment, the inevitable parenthesis of pure nostalgia, is the unexpected revival of “All the Pretty Little Horses”, a song from the English tradition made famous by Current 93 in the eponymous album (in which Balance had also contributed), here exhumed in a minimal form, for voice and xylophone only: a pure emotion jewel called to place Balance's voice at the center of everything and break the hallucinogenic moods of an album with a substantially instrumental vocation.

The same “Teenage Lightining (10th birthday version)” lives its own life even if purged of Balance's singing, constituting an interesting experiment, and not a sterile filler as the more malicious might insinuate. The title-track, finally, is a techno delirium where Balance’s crude screams are a hallucinating siren that sounds like many of the instruments used in the track, also well constructed like the others, strong with complex sound stratifications and rich with winning solutions.

It is difficult to judge an artist on the move, especially if we are talking about a multiform and disconcerting entity like the Coil have been: now that the waters are still, unfortunately, only by listening again to these posthumous albums, knowing that it is now a discourse already concluded, one understands the actual value (beyond the emotional one) of a band that made of courage, experimentation, and professionalism a categorical imperative. What would have followed, we do not know: all that remains is to dive headlong into the masterpieces (old and new) to extract all that remains to be discovered, details we had allowed ourselves to overlook thinking we would never run out of Coil.

Poor deluded: we didn't know that death could be hiding around every corner, ready to interrupt the most beautiful dreams..