We Are Busy Bodies – 30th October 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Released in 2011, IIRON by COH was one of my relatively early reviews. At the time, I was unlike anything I had heard before. It still is, if truth be told. If nothing else, this album was a major event in the way it opened my eyes (and ears) to music I never even could have imagined, or been exposed to previously. It was metal, but not as I’d ever heard it before. And it was a whole lot more. But for some reason, I never delved back to the album’s precursive counterpart, IRON, originally released way back in 2000. The arrival of this remastered edition provides the necessary prompt.
Russian-born Ivan Palvov had been working under the COH moniker for some time already: having relocated to Sweden in 1995. He debuted with the experimental BEFORE that same year, and delivered the appropriately-titled Enter Tinnitus in 1998 – a work which sits (un)comfortably alongside the likes of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire. But IRON did something different, and according to the accompanying bio, ‘grew out of Pavlov’s teenage fascination with heavy metal and the underground record-exchanging community of the late Soviet era. At fourteen, inspired by Iron Maiden’s ‘Running Free,’ he picked up a six-string guitar brought to him by his grandmother and decided that he and his friends could also play that kind of music. Before long, they were rehearsing in a Soviet youth club with whatever equipment was available, looking for the sound they heard in early heavy metal records.’
Funnily – or perhaps not – Iron Maiden put me off metal for a very long time. I began to suffer with insomnia when I was around five years old, and I would lie awake watching the clock tick… my parents usually went to bed around eleven, and being awake after that time was something I found quite scary. Come 1984, aged 8, I heard Iron Maiden’s ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’, and it would torment me as an earworm as the clock ticked on and I lay alone in the dark in the 300-year-old house we lived in, which I was convinced was haunted. But also, as I came into my teens, I would come to the conclusion that hair metal and the likes of Iron Maiden were actually a bit lame, and it wouldn’t be until some time later, when I was introduced to Godflesh and grindcore that I would find my kind of metal.
And then we have IRON, a different kind of metal altogether. There are no guitars here. There sure as hell aren’t any gratuitous solos. Nor are there any drums. Or vocals, histrionic, operatic, guttural, or otherwise. Ivan Palvov explains how ‘The album preserves traces of those early experiences through its titles and references. ‘Rubbing Free’ nods directly to the song that inspired Pavlov to form his first band, while titles like ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ and ‘Love Mites’ reference Metallica and Judas Priest. They also reference the atmosphere surrounding Western music in the Soviet Union, when exchanging records often meant running from the police, having records confiscated, and facing disciplinary consequences. It was a time when Pavlov, as a DJ, would make up a list of fake song titles for the principal to sign off on for a dance event at this school.” But IRON dissects these elements and ideas and pulls them apart to forge a fractured, flickering electronic exploration of an atmosphere, a feeling, rather than the sound of metal itself.
There is, then, an element of nostalgia woven into the heavy construct of this album, which is anything but representative of the metal scene at the time, sonically. Instrumentally, it’s a world away. And IRON is heavy. It opens with the harsh, yawning drone of ‘Annum Per Anum (Pärt 2)’. The extreme stereo panning is nothing short of mind-frothing, and with its stutters and breaks, it makes for a challenging first six minutes. But then, this is a challenging album. ‘East.er.Okay.Hell’ is fabricated around some stop / start heavy synth drones which squelch and stutter, with abrupt halts and lurches, and ‘Love Mites’ evolves from a crackle of static to a cranium-compressing electrical storm. ‘Now [4’19” into 2000]’combines the sound of later Throbbing Gristle with what feels like a panic attack. It’s intense, and not entirely pleasant, but articulates in sound something words simply cannot.
And the way the album is mixed is positively scary. The frequencies pop in a way that is like experiencing something heavy live and at high volume: you can actually feel your nostrils quiver, and your skin crawl and treble while listening to this. feedback and crackling electronica froths and fizzles, and ‘For Whom the Dell Falls’ is built around a sonorous mid-range drone and stuttering beats which flicker and glitch in a furious spilling of flange, and ‘Rubbing Free’ is a surging, sloshing, swampfest whereby the stereo extremes reach a new peak in derangement. It’s little short of mind-melting, and the bass-loaded close, ‘Spiegel I’m Spiegel’ is anything but a gentle wind-down, instead cranking up the dense bass oscillations and piling on the panic.
IRON is an album that make you feel. It makes you feel uncomfortable, tense, panicky, claustrophobic, suffocated. But that’s its success. It hits heavy, and hits hard.
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Pic: Quentin le Joly
