Coil

With their new album Live From The Apocalypse, which is available June 25 via Century Media, Italy’s gothic metal torchbearers Lacuna Coil have captured an intriguing—and ultimately elevating—spotlight of life in the music community amid the COVID-19 pandemic…

"The New Backwards" was conceived by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson in 2007, revisiting stray tracks which hadn't seemed to gel with the material he had chosen for the more somber "Ape of Naples" from 2005, COIL's initial posthumous release, a sort of requiem and a kiss-goodbye to his then recently deceased partner John Balance…

From the opening pairing of "Are You Shivering?" and the gorgeously titled "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night," it's apparent that Coil was making a return during 1999 that would prove to be as influential on the post-industrial scene as its 1984 debut, Scatology…

Two types of records usually have the highest potential for embarrassment: "comedy" records and "scary" records. Unlike an awful pub rock mistake or a tuneless ambient workout, there seems to be nothing more obnoxious than listening to a record that tries – and fails – to be either funny or frightening. Coil's Musick to Play in the Dark 2 takes the latter stab into forbidding, blood-velvet territory and consistently bungles it up…

The first of 4AD owner Ivo Watts-Russell's multi-artist studio sessions under the This Mortal Coil name, 1984's It'll End in Tears was a surprisingly influential album in many circles, key in the reawakening of interest in artists like Alex Chilton and the late Tim Buckley by a younger generation of listeners…

The third and final album by This Mortal Coil, 1991's Blood is neither as unfocused as Filigree & Shadow or as conceptually pure as It'll End in Tears, but it's a solidly enjoyable set. Once again, nearly half the tracks are instrumentals (or tracks with minimal and often wordless female vocals) written by Ivo Watts-Russell and John Fryer, but this batch of tunes holds together much better than the much more amorphous originals on Filigree & Shadow; lengthy atmospheric explorations like "Dreams Are Like Water" sound composed and thoughtful rather than merely pretty…