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There are albums that don't ask to be listened to. They choose you, they hit you like a sudden fever, like a beautiful nightmare you can't shake off. Black Antlers by Coil is one of these. Released in 2004 like a touring ghost, today it has been resurrected thanks to the Dais Records reissue. But it never really died. It was there, lurking. Waiting.
Forget about a “minor work” – this is the last true living metamorphosis of Coil, an album where the sun burns but does not warm. The title might be misleading: there are no black goat horns, but a dirty, murky, carnal electronic pulse, vibrating between the remains of club culture and the ritual glitch at the end of the world.
"The Gimp (Sometimes)" hypnotizes you like a tired and beautiful mantra. "Teenage Lightning" shines like a party gone wrong in a haunted house. And then it arrives: "Sex with Sun Ra," the double invocation to an alien jazz that becomes astral orgasm, ritual glitch jazz, cybernetic sacrilege. The Sun Ra evoked here has nothing poetic about it: it is a mutant entity that gets under your skin, moves between your neurons, and rewrites them. If you listen with closed eyes, it makes you evaporate.
The real sweet nightmare is “The Wraiths and Strays of Paris,” a melancholic collage of live performances, dreams, and synthetic drones, where Coil become tired priests of a cult they're burning from the inside. And then “All the Pretty Little Horses,” a terminal lullaby: a mother sings you to sleep, but there's no cradle, only a black hole.
Black Antlers does not have the composure of The Ape of Naples. It is not a requiem, it is a lucid delirium, a dancing ritual around nothingness. It is one of the most alive, most erotic, most perversely luminous Coil works.
An album dirty, carnal, ambiguous. Like the moment before an eclipse.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 All the Pretty Little Horses ()
Hush-a-bye
Don't you cry
Go to sleepy little baby
Go to sleepy little baby
When you wake
You shall have
All the pretty little horsies
All the pretty little horsies
Blacks and bays
Dapples and greys
All the pretty little horsies
Way down yonder
In the meadow
Lies a poor little lamby
Bees and butterflies
Flitting round his eyes
Poor little thing is crying
"Mammy"
Go to sleep
Don't you cry
Rest your head upon the clover
Rest your head upon the clover
In your dreams
You shall ride
While your mammy's watching over
Blacks and bays
Dapples and greys
All the pretty little horsies
All the pretty little horsies
All the pretty little horsies
All the pretty little horsies
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Other reviews
By mementomori
What kind of badass were the Coil!
Balance’s voice is obviously a croak that exudes disease and perversion in every nuance.
