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Coil, "Love's Secret Domain" (John Kealy)
"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love’s Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton’s artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil’s finest moments.
Chemistry and alchemy run through Coil’s back catalog but it is on Love’s Secret Domain where these processes are at their most evident. Peter Christopherson, John Balance, and Stephen Thrower’s experiments with mind-altering substances during these sessions have taken on the status of legend at this point; judging by some reports, it is hard to imagine how any work got done at all at this time. Yet it is obvious that a lot of hard graft went into the music as the fine editing and arrangements throughout the album do not sound like they happened by accident. In saying that, even the "accidents" like Annie Anxiety’s slurred and intoxicated performance on "Things Happen" sound like she was riding the vibe in the studio as much as she was getting hammered on tequila.
While "The Snow" and "Windowpane" have not aged terribly well (I still love them but they certainly sound like the early ‘90s), they are in the minority here. The various permutations of "Teenage Lightning" still sound as alive now as ever. Out of the three versions, "Lorca Not Orca" always has a timeless punch that always takes me aback. The spidery "Dark River," much like "The First Five Minutes After Death" from Horse Rotorvator, may use sounds which should sound dated now but the energy and power of the music transcends this sort of superficial criticism.
At this point in time, it is hard to separate the album from the memories and feelings tied up with it. The memory of playing the album for the first time and wondering if I had the right CD upon hearing "Disco Hospital." The memories of sitting around in college with friends, getting drunk and looking up at the ceiling which was covered in Christmas lights (until the day they caught fire) as "Windowpane" and "Dark River" filled the air around us. Above all, the memory of driving at night to be with my then-fiancée and nearly crashing as Balance ranted and raved through "Love’s Secret Domain."
It was fitting considering the song’s fixation on love and death; Balance combines the words and concepts of Roy Orbison’s hopeful but sorrowful "In Dreams" with the poetry of William Blake; particularly his two poems on love and loss "Love’s Secret" and "The Sick Rose." Balance adds his own thorns to the words and delivers them with a ferocity that never fails to unnerve. The violence and obsessiveness of his delivery of Orbison’s words; in Balance’s hands these lyrics are an oneiromantic threat. This assimilation and appropriation of Blake and Orbison within Coil’s creative process shows them at their alchemical peak.
Like Coil’s other masterpieces, each play through of Love’s Secret Domain reveals a little more each time. The other day, I noticed some sounds in "Windowpane" which I had never attended to before. Out of all the pieces on this album, "Windowpane" was the last one I expected to still yield surprises but there it was. I feel moments like this demonstrates how much depth Coil went to in creating Love’s Secret Domain. From the original ideas and performances down to Danny Hyde’s production, there is nothing here I would change. Indeed, I always found Stolen and Contaminated Songs, the companion CD to Love’s Secret Domain, to be a pale and flawed mirror to the brilliant and bewitching LSD. My affection for this album can be boiled down to one sentence:
"This is mad love, in love’s secret domain."
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