LOVE'S SECRET DOMAIN

LOVE'S SECRET DOMAIN is commonly called COIL's accessible album but with a medieval art piece on an outhouse door with such a title, let's just say that "accessible" is only a relative term in the strange musical universe inhabited by COIL. I think it's considered as such mostly because of the fact the timings on the majority of tracks are a steady 4/4 beat and the progressive time signatures aren't as prevalent. This like any COIL album is highly experimental and eclectic and if anything more diverse in the influence department. There is the usual strange multitude of sound effects shrouding every beat and rhythm that emerges but unlike the past releases which focused a lot of time to brooding synthesizer jingles, we do a little more variety in the songwriting on this one.

The album begins with "Disco Hospital" with weird groans and electronic sliding notes before it morphs into a strange glitchy type of techno ambient acid house weirdness. We finally get a nice steady drumbeat to normalize the bizarro effect. It actually then becomes a nice loungy exotica number that even 50s housewives in rural Kentucky would like, well for at least a few seconds anyway, back to weirdness. Next track "Teenage Lightning 1", steady beat, klinks and klanks and bloops and bleeps. Robotron dance party? Nice backing vocals that have a nice digital age quality. Then we get "Things Happen" which has a psychotic female persona semi-singing to acid house beats. There is even a short but sweet flamenco guitar piece at the end with embellishments clearly out of the COIL playbook. There is a plethora of guest musicians on this release as well including Marc Almond from Soft Cell.

This album holds together fairly well and is a nice diverse collection of COIL weirdness to suit my appetite for the sonically demented. A few of the tracks on here would be messed around with and would appear in even stranger forms on the following release "Stolen And Contaminated Songs" and the track "The Snow" which is one of the most danceable of all COIL releases would find its very own EP with several remixes. Personally I can't say this is my favorite album by COIL since it's their dark and highly experimental output that excites me the most, but even when they release things that are somewhat closer to "normal" they managed to keep the sound eclectic and interesting. A great place to start for beginner's who wish to acclimate themselves to the idiosyncrasies of this strange electronic world before diving into the truly "out-there" stuff.