The Ape of Naples

..arrived today, with a sleeve like the unfolding mind of Jhon as the world rushed to greet him:

a sunset of sorts that's probably stretching out over the Somerset coastline, marking endtimes and waving gently as Peter heads for the East;

a broken deer, echoing the dark Disney that Coil always were - the space between the Tom of Finland version of Snow White (the 7 phallic symbols pertaining to the seven stages of man, the seven sprigs of the apocaglimpsed starre) and the as-yet-unreleased Clive Barker re-imagining of the death of Bambi;

a black stone heart that could be the hart of the woode from Riddley Walker, that ought to be where everyone's headed in the Blake Midwinter;

a shell of a seahorse, newly rotorvated;

the prongs of the stag, another Riddley reference, a foil to the old jagged edges of earlier Coil incarnations, another reference perhaps to the Truck Stop Paganism of JT Leroy's Sarah;

a bible-black raven (with the original intention of Under Milk Wood now made clear, Llareggub - the town that went mad, the town that took everyone down);

a half beast, morphed out of dead matter and rags (remember what Jhon was wearing in the last string of gigs? rags into riches...), hanging like Burroughs' hangedhappy men...

It's a beautiful, infuriating package, like Coil themselves... worth the entry price alone (almost) and somehow soothing in the way that they (I'm assuming Jhon is around, in one form or another) paid attention to detail even this late in the day, when others may have just sucked in air through the holes in their faces and shoved out a quick money spinner...

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The music, well, I've only listened through once so I'm not about to comment in full just yet (maybe next year) but so far...

It opens in the only way it could, with Jhon questioning:

Does Death come alone, or with eager reinforcements?

and then descending into humchatter and verse as a kind of slow derangement of the film Pi... as if Death is becoming a noun before your eyes and suddenly the world is shedding it's secret numbers and Golden Sections like leaves...

You can see where The Pill Box is going with the re-emergence of the Kate Bush / Jhon Balance / anima / animus life-bond (indeed where I went around about here) - some of this could be the flip-side of Ariel, a soft male incantation of the moment when the swords are dropped and the air is still...

Others evoke the same sense of Parisian decadence that Gavin Friday attempted and reminds me faintly of the Kahimi Karie take on Habanera, along with Coil's AYOR and Further Back and Faster still my favourite mushroom song... you can see this being a direction that Coil might have spun into, doing what Gavin Friday attempted with The Man Seezer, doing what they did do with the Operetta Amorale project...

There's re-imagined versions of late Mexican Death Wave Rattles like Triple Sun, with added sweetness in the vocals that are now almost uniformly sung, rather than spoken which somehow seems incredibly sad because it seems that Jhon was just re-discovering his voice as an instrument, rather than solely as a tool for exorcism and repetance...

Teenage Lightening - the extra e seems to have meaning here - is again re-defined, this time as a thin membrane between the old and the new versions on L.S.D. and Black Antlers... this is the central song on this album as it was on L.S.D and the marima bleeds through to a significant portion of the rest of the tracks, sometimes smothered by echo and paste but mostly sounding like an immensely positive reaffirmation ritual, gentle, aerial, elevated and somehow like the sound that comes from teenagers rubbing together while smiling...

Some of the songs from Backwards are here too; mostly in much improved versions from the bootlegs that crawled the Russian cracks in the net... mostly in versions where the vocals rise and fall, clambering to get out because he knows it's almost time for words to end...

So far, we've had Boy In A Suitcase and Broccoli but, now this is out, the question remains: will Peter sing again?

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