But the combined musical impact of Love's Secret Domain remains undiminished: a sonic world erupting with mind-spinning ingenuity, that beneath its surface strangeness, holds more hooks and grooves than a Cenobite's playroom.Īs always with Coil, however, Love's Secret Domain is about more than music it's an exploration of what it meant, in 1991, to be a deeply inquisitive consciousness, all channels on, all bandwidths open, trapped in a human body and surrounded by the joy, anger and madness of existence. Sure, there are occasional missteps – the foregrounded didgeridoo on 'Where Even The Darkness Is Something To See' was perhaps an unfortunate choice – a crusty scene cliche even at the time, now further tainted here in the UK by the shadow of Rolf Harris and the rhythmic backbone of 'Further Back And Faster', a sample from Renegade Soundwave's 'On TV' chains it firmly to its time, even as the Performance and Night Of The Hunter vocal snatches pull it into other dimensions (and thankfully the didge has by now been significantly mutated). Even 'The Snow', with its hefty kicks and snares marking Coil's deepest nod to the period's all-consuming club culture, now feels more weightless and aethereal than it does corporeal, while the throbbing bass undertow of the album's glistening, hypnotic centrepiece, 'Windowpane', should have made it an eternal club anthem. Its title track's howling torch song groove, the crackling electro-exotica of 'Teenage Lightning' and the jarring excesses of 'Things Happen' remain unlike anything else I can think of, while 'Titan Arch', 'Chaostrophe' and 'Dark River' sound like, well, classic Coil. And, while it certainly reflects the musical world that it emerged from, on reappraisal it's also clear just how thoroughly othered its influences were by exposure to Coil, and how unique its collision of, amongst many other things, noise, acid house, flamenco and musique concrete still sounds.
A Coil publicity shot, circa Love's Secret DomainĬoil's Love's Secret Domain is perhaps the band's most potent time machine, albeit one locked firmly to the spacetime coordinates of its creation, 30 years ago.
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