Originally collated on a demo tape for WaxTrax! records in 1989 under the working title ‘The Side Effects of Life’, these are the raw early iterations of tracks that would become Coil's ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, and arguably one of the ’90s definitive albums. Only a handful of the original cassette are known to exist, and have understandably become important artefacts in their own right, so it’s a massive buzz to finally, physically grasp the album in its entirety, here supplemented by material off the ‘Wrong Eye/Scope’ 7”. Between the album’s two bookending versions of ‘Fidgit’, which later appeared on the ‘WaxTrax! Sampler #2’ tape in 1989, the album spools familiar yet rawer examples of Coil classics such as ‘Dark River’, ‘Teenage Lightening’ and ‘Love's Secret Domain’, each replete with haphazard fades, cuts and stereo bias, and often with lots of ferric noise. However none of that should put prospective listeners off, with results more faithful to the original than the weirdly pitched version found on YouTube and p2p sites.   

Ultimately it’s a proper find for Coil diehards, but anyone intrigued by the hidden reverse of what was going on in parallel to Rave, grunge and post rock in the phase shift between later ‘80s and early ‘90s, should fill their boots.