REVIEW - SCATOLOGY	By Alex Krieger

For quite some time now, Coil fans have had all sorts of trouble getting their hands on the band's first album, 1984's groundbreaking Scatology. Since I was attending Lamplighter Montessouri School in 1984 I missed it the first time around, which is fortunate -- probably I would have started crying; Coil have never been into making soft, comforting albums.

I had to settle for a taped copy in the mid-nineties when I first started developing an interest in Coil. Scatology had long since been out of print, and the band repeatedly told fans not to buy the copies being sold by Some Bizarre/Rough Trade, since they were not receiving royalties. Later on this warning turned into a threat: John Balance, Coil's front man and troubled lead vocalist, declared Scatology and its follow-up Horse Rotorvator accursed. Literally. So of course I gave it a miss.

Happily, this new reissue of Scatology solves that problem: it's distributed by World Serpent, Coil's faithful London-based label -- and if you haven't been pining for a copy and aren't at this very instant scouring websites and record stores for an import, you ought to be -- Scatology is a beautiful, twisted nightmare of an album.

The album begins with homage to Alfred Jarry: "Ubu Noir," effortlessly reminiscent of the bloated spiral on Ubu's ridiculous costume: a looping, lurching, out-of-key opener all the more amazing for its execution on a Fairlight.

The second track, "Panic," is the album's sucker-punch. It was the B-side of their subsequent single "Tainted Love" -- Soft Cell's euro-pop gay anthem reworked as a dirge mourning those first AIDS victims. Frantic horns supposedly contributed by Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell and growling, wailing, banshee vocals blend with a background of speeded-up disco beats and distended double-bass bowing.

"Panic" feels creepy, jittery, like a cross between a bacchanal and Saturday Night Fever. The album's tone shifts from "frantic and unnerving" to "eerie and unnerving" with "At the Heart of It All," which mixes Stephen Thrower's aching suicidal-cry-for-help clarinet with plodding, melancholy keyboards.

A few tracks later, the metallic thunk-thunk piston beat of "Solar Lodge" comes to life. Drumbeats and more wounded clarinet as Balance shouts, "See the black sun rise / From the solar lodge" (no wonder I found this album so fascinating back in high school). "The Sewage Workers' Birthday Party" becomes a subterranean soundtrack for queer pornography.

Scatology is music about turning horrible sounds into beautiful music, about the alchemical transformation of base matter (shit) into gold. It's about fear, pain, loss, and hatred, a manic jumble, too fevered and artless, too visionary to be a pop album or a goth album or a queer album. You've never heard anything like it, and in the years since its release, there's been very little indeed to match it.