Weekend Listening: Coil - Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders)

01

Video

—01. Directed by Peter Christopherson.

Words

I was looking through the most expensive records bought on Discogs this month, and right there at the top, was a limited edition of Coil's 1987 masterpiece Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders). While I recently found that this is actually an album of outtakes from their first two records, you certainly wouldn't know it listening to the LP as a whole. Coil as a group are widely known as 'experimental noise' artists, which, to an outsider, can sound like the most daunting description of music imaginable. I think if you give this record a chance though, you will find more often than not this 'noise' resembles pretty beautiful music. The cuts range wildly in variety, you will hear everything from classical compositions, to screeching madness, to the more rhythmic numbers that ended up being the catalyst for the creation of industrial techno. The song I feature here falls into the more classical category, accompanied by the original video directed by Coil co-founder Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, of Psychic TV fame. Please keep any jokes about its vague similarity to the Game of Thrones theme music to yourself, thanks.

—Coil discography via Discogs