Album review: Coilguns – Odd Love

There’s fuck all ordinary about Coilguns. An offshoot of the 2008 – 2013 line-up of shapeshifting German prog collective The Ocean, the mission was originally to create fast, simple music to counterpoint that band’s legendarily expansive offerings. Their name is a reference to the ‘Gauss rifle’: a device capable of firing lethal projectiles using electromagnets rather than gunpowder. Nominal hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the highest-altitude settlements in Europe, and home to some of history’s greatest watchmakers.

Over a decade in, much has already been made of the machine-tooled precision and skull-splitting power of their hardcore-inflected noise rock. Many have called them musicians with heads in the clouds. But five years on from 2019’s Watchwinders, fourth album Odd Love feels like a definitive statement.

From its tantalisingly offbeat album title and incendiary artwork to the constant eddies and riptides of the 10 songs (and one intro) within, it is both ode to the abstract and proof that Coilguns are a project worth investing in – stubbornly here to stay. “Our music has always been a sane yet intense way to process all the light and deep things we were going through in our personal lives,” says vocalist Louis Jucker. “Oddness is our normality and love is our motor to achieve it.”

Sonically, of course, it’s a lot to take in. From the rattling of opener We Missed The Parade and the peculiar, whistling melodies of Placeholders, to the jazzy, post-rock of Caravel and downbeat, melancholic highlight The Wind To Wash The Pain, there is quality and weirdness in equal measure at every turn.

Much like the excellent latter-day output of American experimentalists The Armed, however, Coilguns never need leave the realms of listenability to indulge their eccentricities. Generic Skincare feels like the breathless intersection of punk and garage rock. Bandwagoning and Venetian Blinds are trippy bangers. And by the time they drag you deep into epic closer Bunker Vaults, very few will be in any hurry to find their way back out again. Oddly excellent, indeed.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: The Ocean, Birds In Row, The Armed

Odd Love is out now via Humus