Coil – Backwards

I honestly don’t know if I could have appreciated Coil’s Backwards before now. This was supposed to be the Coil album that Trent Reznor released on his boutique label Nothing Records in the mid-90s. It always seemed strange to me that he seemed to look forward to its release in interviews but nothing ever came from it. It was merely the mysterious Coil project, and that was all it was ever going to be.

It has finally been released in an official way. Not via bootleg. Not by way of remixes as on The New Backwards. I guess this is the closest thing to a true release since both Jhonn and Sleazy are dead.

Now in my mid-to-late 30s, I really can appreciate the nuances of Coil’s music much more than I could imagine doing so as a teenager. I suppose there is a lot of impatience in adolescence that mellows out with age. Backwards really does fill in the gap in the Coil oeuvre, and impatience or not, it really is a shame that it took this long for it to see the light of day.