This Immortal Coil
The Dark Age of Love

The operation This Immortal Coil was born from an idea of the French producer Stéphane Grégoire, founder of the label Ici D'Ailleurs, and is clearly inspired by the project This Mortal Coil (remember?, the series of albums released during the eighties, born from the collaboration of artists from the historic label 4AD under the guidance of the boss Ivo Watts-Russel).

However, Grégoire does something different and more complex: he builds a formidable tribute to the phenomenal Coil, bringing together contributions from artists who are very distant from each other and above all distant, in style and cultural background, from the band that he intends to celebrate: names like Will Oldham, Thomas Elliott, and Yann Tiersen, just to mention the most well-known, making every lover of good music jump from their seat.

What makes Grégoire's project special, however, is the ability to capture the intrinsic, and not always obvious, universality of the compositions of the British duo: a tribute, in truth, aimed at valorizing the poignant songwriting vein of the late John Balance, rather than the creative genius of Peter Christopherson (the compositions, in fact, will be stripped of their industrial guise, tailored with creativity and expertise by the former Throbbing Gristle, to delve into a more exquisitely acoustic dimension).

From their foundation in 1982 to Balance's untimely death in 2004, Coil continuously changed, succeeding in revitalizing the concept of industrial music and laying the groundwork for a “post” to the movement (originally led, it is always worth recalling, by the seminal Throbbing Gristle of the same Christopherson), thus paving the way for further developments. From the early esoteric industrial, the journey of our Artists thus became tinged with avant-garde and dark-wave moods, moving from the most sophisticated electronic to more funereal ambient, pushing beyond the most danceable disco and intimate songwriting that characterized their latest works. Coil's work managed to innovate and fertilize the ground they walked on; at worst, it was able to catch the faint signals of new trends a moment before they exploded. Well, Grégoire, free from any sterile and useless emulative temptation, succeeds in the endeavor of making the spirit of Coil sprout again and dressing it in a totally new, highly poetic, cultured, refined form: a journey that winds through the meanders of melancholic jazz and along the dusty paths of epic songwriting, through the creaks and clouded visions of alienating chamber music.

Another miracle: the work shines with an unusual stylistic homogeneity for a tribute album: a compactness likely due to Grégoire's patience and devotion to the project, who waited 4/5 years to give birth to a product of high quality and significant meta-musical significance. For this reason, listening is highly recommended even to those unfamiliar with industrial music, while also acknowledging the fact that the album in question remains something truly significant for Coil's fans, orphans of a Balance who left them too soon. True tears, my friends, will be shed by those who still carry the void of that tragic loss within them, because these are tears these eleven moving compositions, crafted with intelligence and passion, in the interactions of a collective of perfectly orchestrated musicians: a drop of light in an abyss of Nothingness, like the discovery of photo albums depicting the dear departed.

The opening of the title track is from tears, enlivened by the splendid, enveloping, graceful voice of Israeli singer Yael Naim, one of the most beautiful voices these ears have ever heard: the soft tones of an elegant, poignant, and agonized jazz-noir, vaguely seasoned with the typical tones of bossa nova, open the dances, but it's only the beginning: Matt Elliott and Yann Tiersen build a somber four-handed reinterpretation of “Red Queen.” Elliott's cavernous recitation recalls the Balance of “Musick to Play in the Dark,” while the piano notes lose themselves crystal clear in the void of vast night skies, a sweet lullaby not devoid of the concerns that pervade the original track.

The honor and the burden of resurrecting one of the most intense pieces of the entire Coil production falls to William Oldham: “Ostia” retains the Mediterranean environments, thanks also to the fundamental contribution of the Belgian string quartet DAAU, which among other things will mark many of the tracks presented here; the young American singer-songwriter's hoarse voice, for its part, makes acrobatics, holds up, albeit not succeeding in rendering all the complexities of Balance's unparalleled performance. But beware: woe to make comparisons with the original tracks, as the reinterpretations are often distant from the repertoire that was, rather acquiring their own life, living in a dimension foreign to that in which they were conceived as they are reread and interpreted by extremely different sensibilities.

It is useless to dwell on the details of a sterile track by track, given that every single episode shines with its own light and sounds like something sublime to our ears. But let me mention the instrumental ecstasy of “Chaostrophy,” with Morricone-like intensity; the immensity of the apocalyptic, oblique, desolate songwriting of Elliott in the two versions of “Love Secret Domain” and in yet another reinterpretation of the classic “Teenage Lightning”; the beautiful “Tatooed Man,” which once again features the divine Yael Naim behind the microphone and piano. The French composer Sylvain Chauveau will instead lend his voice in “Amber Rain,” another delightful gem of apocalyptic songwriting. It is important to emphasize the fact that, even though losing the edginess of the perversion that animates Balance's poetics, the tracks maintain a dreamlike and lunar (and why not?, apocalyptic!) charm that is undoubtedly attributable to the artistic vision of the band being tributed.

The selection of the tracks, finally, does not claim to be exhaustive: many fundamental tracks are left out to make room for undoubtedly negligible episodes, with an eye on the more catchy moments of the band's repertoire and recent production, indeed more distant from the harsh industrial of the beginnings and therefore more easily translatable into a soft-singer-songwriter context like the one chosen to operate within. But it is the sense of unity of the whole, finally, that justifies choices that only appear questionable, driven rather by the taste of the passionate fan.

And as a passionate fan, I can only warmly recommend purchasing a work that is not a mere tribute album, much less a dismally nostalgic endeavor, but a true masterpiece directed to the ears of anyone possessing taste and passion for good music.

As written in the liner notes: “To all the dreamers still asleep”.

Track-list:

. The Dark Age of Love

. Red Queen

. Ostia

. Chaostrophy

. Love Secret Domain

. Tatooed Man

. Teenage Lightning

. Amber Rain

. Cardinal Points

. Blood from the Air

. Outro LSD