| Horse Rotorvator | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Coil |
| Cover: | Coilhorserotorvator.jpg |
| Caption: | original LP cover |
| Released: | 1986 |
| Length: | 49:15 (Some Bizzare CD version) |
| Label: |
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| Producer: | Coil |
| Prev Title: | Scatology |
| Prev Year: | 1984 |
| Next Title: | Gold Is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) |
| Next Year: | 1987 |
Horse Rotorvator is the second studio album by English experimental music group Coil, released in 1986.
The album was ranked No. 73 in the Pitchfork list "Top 100 Albums of the 1980s".[1]
The album title was inspired by a dream of Balance's in which the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slit the throats of their horses and assembled their jawbones into a device large enough to "plough up the waiting world."[1] The cover photograph was shot by the band and shows the bandstand in Regent's Park, London, which was subject to the Hyde Park and Regent's Park bombings four years before the album's release.
A cover of Leonard Cohen's "Who by Fire" is featured on the album. "Ostia" meditates on the murder of radical Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Guests include Marc Almond and his collaborator Billy McGee.
Horse Rotorvator was initially released in the UK in 1986 by Force & Form and was manufactured by K.422, a Some Bizzare Records side label. In the USA, the album was released by Relativity Records. The album was first reissued on CD in 1988.[2] [3]
AllMusic called the album a "refinement of brute noise and creepily serene arrangements into a truly modern psychedelia, from tribal drumming and death march guitars to disturbing samples and marching band samples and back", crediting the group with "eschewing easy clichés on all fronts to create unnerving, never easily-digested invocations of musical power". Pitchfork named it among the best albums of the 1980s and stated that "the bulk of these songs are grand, sweeping treatments of themes of death and betrayal, wrought in a collage of noise and restless rhythms [...] Equally austere, humorous, and frightening, Horse Rotorvator stands as one of the more unique projects of its decade."[1]
Notes
| Peak position | ||
| UK Indie Chart[4] [5] | 3 |
|---|