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Coil, "Love's Secret Domain" and "The Snow" (Matthew Jeanes)
In the summer of 1993, my friend Eric showed up at my house with a grocery bag full of CDs that he swore I needed to hear. Among them were Lustmord's Paradise Disowned and Heresy and just about everything available at the time from Coil. I had already been exposed to Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, but this was my first taste of Coil and I started with Horse Rotorvator because I figured that I needed to hear any record that kicked off with a song called "The Anal Staircase" immediately.
By the time I made my way to Love's Secret Domain, I was thoroughly creeped out.It took dance-floor remixes of "The Snow" from Jack Dangers to warm me up to Love's Secret Domain. Those mixes sounded like bits of the Coil track slapped over an extended version of Meat Beat Manifesto's Psyche Out and that was something I could dig. All of the talk of blood and sucking and brains was too much at first, but eventually Love's Secret Domain wound up as the only Coil full length that I owned.
 
I had a cassette copy of LSD that stayed on fairly permanent rotation in my car as I delivered pizzas and traveled back and forth from my apartment to my college campus through the mid 1990s.As I listened to the cassette, I always felt like I was waiting to get to "Windowpane" or "The Snow" or the title track—the more accessible and dance-oriented songs that were surrounded by Coil's more spaced-out compositions. I liked all of it, but the songs more closely-related to the Wax Trax dance aesthetic were my favorites.
But listening back on the album now, it seems absurd to think that those songs were accessible by any standards other than Coil's.If the bad-trip lyrics from "Windowpane" weren't enough to send ravers running for the exit, the absolutely dead-creepy delivery surely was. At the time, I was wrapped up in a subculture where each new band was inspired to outdo the filth and darkness of the band before, and I was perhaps a little blind to just how subversive and menacing this album gets.
One year we opened up our dorm to local disadvantaged neighborhood kids and we decorated the halls with typical Halloween adornments. I got to pick the music for our hallway since most of the guys around me were off getting sloshed, so I stuck on an eerie mix of Lab Report's Unhealthy, early Skinny Puppy, and selected tracks from Love's Secret Domain and watched as kids peered into my dorm room in horror.
It was all clearly too much for a young mind to take.
 
