Coil – The New Backwards

April 18, 2008 • Threshold House

For some time now, The Ape of Naples has been one of my all-time favorite albums, and Coil one of my favorite artists. Their brand of brooding industrial/electronic music was right up my alley. When I discovered The New Backwards I was at first disappointed to hear that it was basically a remix album of an older set of Coil demos with some Ape of Naples samples and references, it does have its own charm that gives it a certain replay value even if it isn't as good as most of Coil's discography.

Normally, I'm not really that much into remixes, but Coil has built a lot of their material around reworking songs in both the studio and on stage (I probably have at least three versions of "Teenage Lightning", for example, from various official releases) so by this point I'm used to hearing redone versions of their songs. This in particular is Coil at their most electronicky—more consistent drum patterns, lots of glitchy, techno-influenced, noisy samples, looped samples of a wailing, muttering, pitch-shifted Jhonn Balance. To me it seems like a somewhat dancier followup to Black Antlers, with a similar claustrophobic pseudo-industrial sound. "Backwards" in particular has a really nice heavy grinding beat which sounds great, and we are also treated to some other neat sounds like the trumpet solos in "Princess Margaret's Man in the D'Jamalfna". It's definitely holding up Coil's standards of diversity in their sound.

So the sound is overall pretty similar to Coil's other work, which implies that the remixers did a decent job at cleaning up the demos for this release (I would hope so, since one of them was of course Peter Christopherson, the other half of Coil) and it fits well into their existing catalogue. I was at first put off by the amount of vocals on the album; there's definitely more than on their last few albums (maybe even the live ...And the Ambulance Died in His Arms, but I could be wrong), but now I see them as being very appropriate; it's an extrapolation of the repetitive mantra style used in their later releases (especially ...And the Ambulance Died in His Arms) and actually fits the mood quite well.

But even so, as much as I try to make myself see The New Backwards as a collection of remixes and not a standard studio album, it's very difficult; if this were a studio album it wouldn't work terribly well, but as a remix album it's up there among the best I've heard. It offers a taste of a sound we'll sadly never hear more of from the band and a reminder to treasure what we do have.

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