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Coil, "Love's Secret Domain" (Anthony D'Amico)
When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think I managed to hear Love's Secret Domain until 1994, by which point I had already accumulated several other Coil albums as consolation purchases.  Despite that, the album was still enough of a departure from what I had heard to make a huge impact on me.  Sleazy jokingly described it as the band's "party album" for a reason, as there is a great deal of fun, kitsch, and wry comedy lurking amidst the darkness.  It most overtly manifests itself in the lysergic exotica of "Teenage Lightning" and "Disco Hospital," both of which brilliantly approximate a bizarre cabaret of the damned.  "Disco Hospital," incidentally, is probably my favorite opening track from any album ever, sounding like an unholy collaboration between a VCR eating a Looney Tunes episode, a swirling blade, and a relentlessly cheery organist.  Then, of course, there is Annie Anxiety's faux-Nicaraguan prostitute stream of consciousness rambling in "Things Happen."  Still more amusement lies further beneath the surface, as Balance appropriates the entire chorus of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" for the title piece and the album's cover art is actually the door of Stephen Stapleton's outhouse.
Probably the most important thing about this album, however, is the fact that it contains the utterly mesmerizing "Love's Secret Domain," which still sounds completely deranged, fresh, and unique even two decades later.  Despite their vast discography, it was pretty rare for Coil to record actual focused, structured "songs" and "Love's Secret Domain" might be the most single most perfectly distilled example of Coil's genius ever released.  Few songs have had as massive an impact on me as that one, as a Blake-quoting Englishman instantly made most of the "extreme" music that I had been listening to sound dull and dogmatic by comparison.  Blast beats, de-tuned guitars, raspy "industrial" vocals, and squalls of feedback were not nearly as scary and heavy as whatever the hell it was that John Balance was channeling.  Rarely has the massive gulf between style and substance been so starkly illustrated for me: the song sounds like a wounded and wrenching dispatch from somewhere well past the edge of sanity.
There are some other great songs as well ("Chaostrophy," for example), but the album admittedly has some flaws as a complete and coherent artistic statement.  However, I don’t feel that they are especially damning ones.  The first is that it is a bit bloated, featuring no less than 3 versions of "Teenage Lightning" and few less-than-amazing pieces that maybe should not have made the cut.  The original version of Love's Secret Domain (on Torso) only had 9 extremely well-chosen songs though and I would rather hear the bonus material (especially "Lorca Not Orca") than not hear it.  This was a hugely fruitful creative period (Stolen and Contaminated Songs was also culled from these sessions), so I don't mind the extra material, even if it comes at the expense of sequencing a bit.
The other oft-cited issue is that the album is stylistically all over the map and that some of those styles have not aged particularly well, primarily the straightforward club beats of "Windowpane" and "The Snow."  To a certain extent, I agree– I rarely listen to those two songs at all.  However, it wasn't like Coil tried to make house music and failed miserably.  "The Snow" was a pretty unusual and innovative take on what was happening in dance music at the time.  Despite the pedestrian beats, they brought some uniquely queasy and spectral textures to the form–Coil were not a band that cheerfully relied on factory preset sounds, nor were they content to let anything make it onto an album without at least some hallucinatory studio-tweaking.  Certainly, Coil was a bit fractured and scattered direction-wise at this point in their career (and a bit over-prone to embracing trends), but their inventiveness and sheer otherness was apparent no matter what they tried.  Love's Secret Domain is an eccentric grab bag rather than a solid, deliberate album, but the low-points are more due to the vagaries of changing tastes over time rather than any egregious artistic failings.
Love's Secret Domain is not Coil's greatest work and it is rare for me to listen to it in its entirety these days, but I still love it.  I would not hesitate at all to describe it as a masterpiece.  It is not perfect by any means, yet there is no denying that it was (and is) an audacious, wild, passionate, and gutsy effort that sounded like absolutely no one else around (and even made oboes sound cool).  It is very difficult to hear this album for the first time and not emerge startled, changed, or moved in some way.
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