or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Stolen & Contaminated Songs is somewhat of an atypical release for Coil. It is an album created based on outtakes and scraps of audio from the Love’s Secret Domain sessions. The leftover bits were chosen, reworked, remixed, and often times spliced together using even older unused material along with newer material. In theory, an album such as this can run the risk of being a throwaway piece, as well as not being able to stand on its own. However, that is one of the key successes of Stolen & Contaminated Songs. It is a truly interesting, flowing work for Coil, and the similarities with its ‘companion’ album, Love’s Secret Domain, are surprisingly small in number.

Tracks such as “Further”, “Who’ll Tell” create a sound which is almost proto-IDM- a fusion of clipped pieces of dialogue, a very primitive form of glitch, and the occasional erratic percussive pattern. For the most part, the song structures are loose and undefined. The aforementioned “Further” lurches along through at least five or six different segments, each having a distinctive quality to it; yet, each one contains traces of the previous segments – all this for a song which is only slightly over four minutes in length.

Orchestration plays a strong role in a number of the tracks here, often times appearing unaccompanied by any sort of electronic elements. This most prominently occurs in two shorter songs, “Original Chaostrophy” and “Corybantic Ennui”. These tracks are both based upon sections of “Chaostrophy” from Love’s Secret Domain. One could make the argument that these are merely bridges from the pervious song into the next. While they perform that duty notably well, there is clearly enough merit within each for them to stand on their own.

Of course, it would not really be a Coil release without the more bizarre and frightening tracks. “Who’ll Fall” may very well be the most upsetting song they’ve released. Throughout the entire track, a slow, minor, looping melody plays (on what may or may not be a heavily processed guitar), backed by light touches of random static and samples of someone’s answering machine. It doesn’t sound very upsetting yet, huh? Well, the kicker in this song is that the melody is overlaid with an actual answering machine message of one of the band’s friends saying “Peter, one of my friends just committed suicide...”. The message continues throughout the entire length of the track with the person wondering what it’s like in between the decision to kill yourself and actually dying. It is truly an expression of real sadness that puts the actual music into a new light. Originally it could be seen as somewhat soothing, but the words turn it into something far greater. “Who’ll Fall” could have easily come off as a gimmicky track had it been done incorrectly. But as it is, it stands as a very real emotional statement.

Stylistically, there is a bit of everything here: the proto-IDM (which Coil later abandoned), orchestral music, the unnerving ambience of “Her Friends the Wolves”, and strangely enough, jazz on “Omalgus Garfungiloops”. Despite all of that, though, it flows together very nicely creating a very surreal sound. Stolen & Contaminated Songs extends far beyond its trappings as a ‘remix’ album not only to be an original, interesting piece of music, but also to be one of Coil’s strongest albums.