Containing reworkings of material appearing on the leaked demo of Coil’s unreleased Backwards album, The New Backwards, like the semi-posthumous The Ape of Naples, shows a rather sharp change in style from their previous studio album (discounting the machine process material of 2003/2004′s ANS releases), 2002′s The Remote Viewer, which focused on drones mixed with ethnicity-linked instrumentation.  It also differs from the ‘main-line’ material the group released around 1993 or 1996 (the alleged dates for the recording of the original Backwards) and ends up feeling more like cast-offs from 1991′s Love’s Secret Domain or their vs. side-projects (e.g., Coil vs. ELpH) than any of their subsequent Coil-only works.

Audio manipulation plays a heavy role in the songs, with distortion, pitch-shifting, chopping, stitching, and randomization regularly applied to the vocals.  Masses of altered samples and densely-programmed synths provide the accompanying rhythms and other audio activity, warbling, juddering, uncurling, and expanding in disorienting directions, only to thread out a clear melody from the disorder.  While notably less satisfying than one of Coil’s full ‘concept’ albums, of which there were relatively few, it still presents the group’s technical and creative qualities in impressive form, with a few moments of striking emotion among the more process-focused work.