Coil — Music To Play In The Dark Vol 2

A year after releasing Vol one of Music To Play In The Dark, Coil dispatched the second part onto an expectant audience. Vol One had reinvented Coil and there was a high level of anticipation and anxiety over what  Vol two was to entail.

Firstly this album is quiet, and at times staggeringly beautiful, some moments invoke a creepy haunted house feeling , but the album is always hypnotic. The first time I heard Jhonn Balance's voice was on an MP3 clip of Where are you featured on this CD. He had the most unnervingly mesmerising tone I had ever heard. It just resonated with intent and force and yet was quiet and considered. The tracks here like Vol one are highly experimental with many different elements coming together over seven fairly long pieces. The opener Something is a slow building crescendo of strange synth noise, sounding like wind and drones, coupled with Balance simply repeating the word Something, over and over again. Tiny Golden books is similar in approach to Red birds will fly out of the east and destroy Paris in a night from Vol 1. Very sequenced and layered electronica and gently building around simple hypnotic melodies and rhythms. There are parts of this piece that evoke the early ambient works by Brian Eno or Harold Budd, but like the track from Vol 1 it is the influence of Tangerine Dreams that is most felt.

Ether drifts around a gorgeous piano melody from Thighpaulsandra and distorted soothing vocals from Balance. Similar in tone to Red Queen from Vol 1 it never-the-less has a more melancholic and uplifting feel.  Paranoid inlay is all surreal sounds and very odd text from Balance about collecting shiny things, while a simple melody is played on what sounds like a harpsichord. The lovely Rose Mcdowall makes an spectral appearance on An emergency, calling into the darkness of another subtle creepy track full of creaks and electronic groans.  The most chilling track is Where are you. Here Balance's deep penetrating voice calls out the ghost in the room to talk to him about the suffering of man, as Thighpaulsandras piano warped into the sound of a possessed child’s toy chimes in the background.  I had heard people saying how Coil had more darkness and atmosphere in their music than any corpse painted metal band could, and as the voice of the little ghost boy becomes audible and Balance chants "All of us a wounded, anaesthmatised in A+E, numbed by stuff we should not see" I knew exactly what they were talking about.

The final piece is a bit of a modern Coil classic. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn) begins with more strange electronic manipulations and text from Balance before he begins chanting a rhythmic tone in a language that sounds like some sort of hybrid Latin . It may not be a language, but whatever he’s saying it has a quite amazing effect. Like a church full of Gregorian or Buddhist monks calling to the gods. These are the moments that Coil were all about, transcendence, illumination under the sonic light of the moon.