I really, really love Coil's music. I was on their mailing list back in the 90s, sleazy would occasionally post corrections; balance would sometimes post lyrics from sleazy's email. When jhon died everyone sent in something -- a remembrance, a note, an anecdote, something -- and it was all printed up and buried with him. Something someone said that stuck with me was "it feels like every lyric john wrote was about his death and getting ready for this moment".
All of Coil's really great middle period albums have this kind of effect. Scatology/Horse Rotorvator are sort of a pair, with "Gold Is The Metal With The Broadest Shoulders" as a kind of b-sides/leftovers album. Love's Secret Domain/Stolen & Contaminated Songs is like a deep house version of this meditation on death/AIDS/dance culture (
"Titan Arch" with Marc Almond or
"The Snow"). It never got officially released but it's an LSD out-take, there's a sort of bridge between the AIDS terror of Horse Rotorvator and the jazzy cabaret pastiche of Love's Secret Domain in one of the other songs they did with Marc Almond,
"The Dark Age of Love".
The early stuff was funded by Sleazy's art work with Hipgnosis (famously he did a bunch of the Pink Floyd stuff. I think the beds on the beach was his, I think he was involved with Animals as well; a lot of the 90s stuff was funded from like, Van Halen videos and stuff).
The latter days stuff (Musick To Play In The Dark v1/2) is also vital but in a sort of ... healed, wiser, less panicked way? Like you can feel that exhaustive terror in Scatology and Horse Rotorvator but by like the LSD era there's still that sense but it's more detached, accepted. and by the Musick to Play in the Dark they're more past the panic and into just living life and being and learning. It's still moving and terrifying, of course, but that sense of mourning is replaced with a calm.
