vinylfanatics.com

**Cabaret Voltaire - Red Mecca: Industrial Prophets in Full Flight**

In the pantheon of industrial music's founding fathers, Cabaret Voltaire's "Red Mecca" stands as their undisputed masterpiece—a savage, hypnotic beast that captures the Sheffield trio at their most focused and ferocious. Released in 1981, this album represents the perfect storm of Richard H. Kirk's electronic wizardry, Stephen Mallinder's menacing vocals, and Chris Watson's tape manipulation genius, creating a sonic blueprint that would influence everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Aphex Twin.

By the time Cabaret Voltaire entered the studio to record "Red Mecca," they had already established themselves as pioneers of Britain's industrial underground. Formed in 1973 in the post-industrial wasteland of Sheffield, the band emerged from the same cultural vacuum that spawned The Human League and Heaven 17, but while their contemporaries flirted with pop sensibilities, Cabaret Voltaire dove headfirst into the mechanical abyss. Their early releases on Rough Trade—particularly the confrontational "Mix-Up" and the sprawling experimentation of "The Voice of America"—had marked them as sonic terrorists, but "Red Mecca" saw them channeling their chaos into something approaching song structures without sacrificing an ounce of their abrasive power.

The album opens with "Touch of Evil," a grinding, relentless groove that sounds like a factory floor come to life. Mallinder's vocals, processed through layers of distortion and delay, emerge like transmissions from some dystopian future, while Kirk's synthesizers pulse and wheeze with mechanical precision. It's industrial music in its purest form—not the metal-influenced bombast that would later dominate the genre, but something more insidious and hypnotic. The track establishes the album's central theme: the dehumanization of modern life, filtered through the lens of electronic paranoia.

"Split Second Feeling" follows, perhaps the album's most accessible moment, built around a hypnotic drum machine pattern that wouldn't sound out of place in a nightclub—if that nightclub happened to be located in a nuclear bunker. The song's genius lies in its restraint; where other industrial acts might pile on the noise, Cabaret Voltaire understand the power of space and repetition. Watson's tape manipulations create ghostly echoes that dance around the central groove, while Mallinder's vocals alternate between seductive whispers and urgent commands.

The album's centerpiece, "A Thousand Ways," pushes further into experimental territory, with found sounds and field recordings creating a collage of urban decay. It's here that the band's debt to musique concrète becomes most apparent, but unlike academic electronic composers, Cabaret Voltaire ground their experiments in the rhythmic pulse of dance music. The result is something genuinely unsettling—music that makes you move while simultaneously making your skin crawl.

Throughout "Red Mecca," the production work of Mallinder and Kirk creates a sense of claustrophobic intimacy. Every sound feels close-miked and uncomfortably present, from the mechanical breathing of synthesizers to the distant clatter of found percussion. This attention to sonic detail would become a hallmark of the band's approach, influencing countless electronic artists who followed.

The album's legacy extends far beyond its immediate impact on industrial music. Tracks like "Black Mask" and "Spread the Virus" anticipated the dark electronic sounds that would dominate underground clubs throughout the 1980s and beyond. The band's use of sampling and tape loops predated hip-hop's embrace of similar techniques, while their integration of dance rhythms with experimental electronics laid groundwork for everything from EBM to techno.

Following "Red Mecca," Cabaret Voltaire would continue evolving, gradually incorporating more conventional song structures and even achieving minor commercial success with albums like "The Covenant, The Sword & The Arm of the Lord." Watson departed in 1981, leaving Kirk and Mallinder to explore increasingly dance-oriented territory throughout the decade. While later albums like "Micro-Phonies" brought them closer to mainstream acceptance, none matched the concentrated intensity of "Red Mecca."

Today, "Red Mecca" stands as a monument to industrial music's golden age—a reminder that electronic music can be both intellectually challenging and physically compelling. In an era when "industrial" has become synonymous with leather pants and guitar riffs, Cabaret Voltaire's masterpiece serves