by Jess Harvell
A sly and nasty riposte to domestication, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is a bloody-minded record, at times sounding like a cattle-prod surge delivered directly to the spine. A stocktaking of the previous four decades of outsider blare -- from La Monte Young, to Metal Machine Music, to even the earliest Butthole Surfers -- Coil soils their pawn-shop electronics in blood and sweat, a muscular return to industrial roots. The nominal normal track, &I Am the Green Child,& stumbles along like Krautrock coupled with the Exorcist soundtrack. Singer John Balance intones a pretentious and portentous text, voice almost drown in a thick gauze of processing. After this wheezing discourse crawls to a halt, several tracks follow like the lament of a dying washing machine. Finally, in a curious silence thrown into even sharper relief by what follows, Balance sings a few more lines about death and all hell breaks loose, a torrential downpour of upended machine jabber. From the opening of gallows sine waves to the final 16 minutes of revolving noise loops, Coil are implacably devoted to proving their aphorism &persistence is all.&