A brass band carries on somewhere outside while the room seems to tilt. Coil’s Gold Is the Metal (with the Broadest Shoulders) draws some of its disquiet from recorded life, including a drunken Mexican band and sounds captured by Peter Christopherson at a Thai boxing arena. There is something particularly uncomfortable about a celebration heard through the wrong wall. Pleasure continues, but an invitation cannot be assumed.
Originally released in 1987, the album returns through Mute and Threshold House, with the remaster guided by Stephen Thrower. Its largely instrumental construction gives words a reduced role, allowing the collision of textures and found recordings to carry the unease. With voices appearing only intermittently, there is plenty of room for unwelcome thoughts.
“Cardinal Points” offers one of the clearest routes into this world, its string arrangements lending the music a cinematic sweep. Beauty becomes a source of uncertainty here. The invitation to surrender feels genuine, even when the destination remains obscure.
Elsewhere, the machinery supplies its own disturbances. “Metal in the Head” incorporates a hired Fairlight sampler malfunctioning, randomly rearranging and distorting the music. An expensive instrument loses its manners. Preserving that failure gives the piece a particularly appealing perversity: the equipment gets to interrupt the people who hired it.
The joins between pieces are equally suggestive. The original notes describe “…Of Free Enterprise” as “the picture completed, via Acapulco.” “Aqua Regalia,” meanwhile, preserves an abandoned piece intended for The Dark Age of Love, with a string part played by Richard Fur-Verge.
That attraction to damaged familiarity gives the album a useful friction in the present. Against the expectation that an electronic production should arrive with every surface buffed, a malfunction preserved as music feels positively hospitable. There is room for the thing that went wrong.
The new edition presents Gold Is The Metal as the closing part of a trilogy begun with Scatology and Horse Rotorvator, gathering material sidelined during the latter’s sequencing. The original sleeve notes used a more provisional description: “a stopgap and a breathing space,” offering otherwise placeless music a home. Both accounts leave something valuable exposed. A record can carry the intimacy of unfinished business without requiring an apology.
Its brevity of gesture is part of that intimacy: “Boy In A Suitcase” lasts little more than a minute, while “Soundtrap” is over in 38 seconds. Such proportions ask for a different kind of attention. Expect each piece to establish a self-contained world and the quick departures can frustrate. Accept the cuts as part of the composition and their abruptness becomes an attraction.
Thrower and Ossian Brown have reconstructed the artwork for this edition, expanding it with archival material and John Balance’s personal notes. There is a pleasing correspondence between that handling of the physical remains and an album assembled from recordings that had escaped another record. The scraps retain their awkward edges. Gold is an appropriate metal for this music, but polish would be the wrong ambition.