Coil - "Selvaggina, Go Back Into The Woods"

Selvaggina is a limited edition live album, recorded on June 11th, 2004 in Jesi, Italy. This appears to be the full set of the concert, and contains a new version of every track from previous studio effort Black Antlers. As such, the question of which has more value to the listener is to be considered. Selvaggina is well recorded and excellently performed, and some of the kinks of Antler versions of the tracks have been ironed out. For example, opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is here a more vibrant and shorter version than its counterpart, but retains its aura of goofy menace. "Sex With Sun Ra" retains the vibe of the Antlers version, but with more urgent vocalizations from Jhonn Balance, and animated work from Tom Edwards on the marimba. There's a telling bit of stage banter from Balance about this concert: "We're truncating, we're making shorter the things tonight because we haven't got enough time unfortunately to do the long versions we wanted to do, so apologies for that, but maybe you're being saved from our indulgences, I don't know." The editing that the band does on the songs here is very noticeable, sounding refined and worked-on, improving on the studio versions in every way. Of all of the live albums that Coil released in the last few years of its existence, this is the best, hands-down. This may be one of the harder pieces of the Coil catalogue to track down (this was limited to a mere 230 copies), and it is undoubtedly one of the best. How perverse of them, to do that to their fans.