Coil - The New Backwards LP

Label: Important

Our Review:

With the release of Backwards in 2015, an important piece of the Coil legacy has been uncovered. That album and those sessions were created by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with Danny Hyde and Drew McDowell in the early '90s for a planned release on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records. Those sessions remained the stuff of legend with tracks appearing in live sets and infiltrating the shadow corners of the internet as horribly lossy recordings. Coil kept shelving all of the Backwards sessions up until Balance died in an alcohol related accident in 2004. In the following years, Christopherson revisited the Backwards sessions, to deliver The New Backwards album along with The Ape Of Naples which included material from the Backwards session as well as tracks dating much earlier. Looking at both The New Backwards and Backwards, many of the same tracks are present but often in radically different forms; and there are a couple of tracks that are unique to each set of recordings. The alchemy of Coil was both a blessing and a curse. Their constant experimentation and radical deconstruction of their own tracks provide an amazingly diverse set of ideas from these electronic geniuses; but the Backwards and New Backwards sessions show that Coil may not have ever agreed on what a definitive version may be on that material. Nonetheless, The New Backwards is an essential recording in the Coil's legendary body of work.