Comprised of tracks originally recorded for a projected release onTrent Reznor’s Nothing Records in 1996, the re-mixed and finally finished songs on The New Backwards still manage to sound fresh twenty years after their inception.  The New Backwardsprovides something of a missing link in Coil’s back catalog; the albums connects the dark-experimentalism-with-beats of the post-Love’s Secret Domain era to the more ambient soundscapes of their work at the cusp of the millennium.  The songs on The New Backwards pulse with organic life, throbbing and squirming like specimens under a microscope.  Given that it remained unfinished after Jhonn Balance’s death, “Paint Me as a Dead Soul” possesses an eerie, unsettling spectrality that reminds me a bit of the ending of the film Carnival of Souls.  But then, I suppose that is what The New Backwards is…the return of a ghost we’ve already been missing for too long.

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