Cabaret Voltaire - The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord (LP) - White Vinyl

By 1985, Cabaret Voltaire had already nudged industrial music onto the dancefloor with The Crackdown and the sleek bite of Micro-Phonies. The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord arrived as the darker twin to that success, more feral in tone and more deeply wired into the media-sick mood of the mid‑80s. The title borrows from an American extremist group of the same name, which sparked a predictable fuss at the time. In the US, the sleeve and spine were trimmed to The Arm of the Lord, a neat reminder of how quickly satire can be mistaken for sympathy. From the first needle drop, though, you hear what they were really after. It is a study in control and menace, a collage of TV chatter, evangelical bark and blunt-force rhythm that still feels unnervingly current.

The Sheffield duo of Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder had been refining their own studio language for years, and you can hear the confidence in the way this record breathes. Drum machines hit like rivet guns, basslines stalk rather than strut, and the synthesisers smear colour across the frame instead of filling it. “I Want You” remains the easiest entry point, a club‑hardened single that bends a desire line into something more like surveillance. “Kickback” is nastier and leaner, all clipped snares and needling samples that make you feel like you are stuck between channels on a shortwave radio. Even the slower passages keep the tension up. Mallinder’s vocal sits low, half-intoned and half-whispered, a guide through an urban maze of CCTV, sermons and slogans. Kirk’s programming does the rest, turning static into rhythm and turning rhythm into architecture.

Cabaret Voltaire always had a keen ear for American signals, and here they set that fixation in concrete. Snatches of preachers and politicians rub against action‑film shards, the way a late-night TV session can become a fever dream. It is no accident that the album’s title points across the Atlantic. The group it references was raided that same year, and the album reads like a cold mirror held up to that climate of moral panic and gun cult bravado. This is not a polemic, though. It is a mood piece, a night walk through a city wallpapered with adverts and threats, where the beat becomes the only stable thing you can hold.

What keeps the record from turning into grey sludge is the duo’s sense of groove. Cabaret Voltaire were never content to simply grind. The low end is sculpted for movement, and even the most abrasive textures sit in a mix that invites you to lean in. Compared with the pop-sharpened edges of Sensoria the year before, this has fewer obvious hooks, but it is richer as a world. The studio itself becomes an instrument, with tape edits, sampler stutters and treated voice giving the illusion of a broadcast beamed from a bunker. You can hear why DJs and producers later claimed this period as a blueprint. It is tough, functional electronics with a head full of ghosts.

Contemporary critics were split, some missing the point of the title and some pining for more chart‑friendly moments. Time has been kind. In the long view, The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord looks like a hinge record, easing industrial funk toward the warehouse and prefiguring the stark, loop‑driven logic that would carry into late‑80s dance culture. You can drop “I Want You” in a set next to early EBM and it still locks in. For fans who came in via later solo work by Kirk, this is the crucible, the place where his taste for information overload becomes muscle memory.

On vinyl it really comes alive. The bottom end breathes, the room noise around the samples gives it grit, and that serrated top end cuts through without fatigue if you have a clean copy. Original UK pressings on Some Bizzare via Virgin turn up now and then, and there have been reissues that make The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord vinyl easier to track down without paying collector prices. If you haunt a Melbourne record store on a Saturday, you will sometimes see Cabaret Voltaire vinyl filed between Coil and DAF, which feels about right. And if you prefer to buy Cabaret Voltaire records online, there are plenty of reputable shops that specialise in Cabaret Voltaire albums on vinyl, including a few focused on vinyl records Australia wide.

If you are building a shelf that explains how the 80s got from post‑punk rubble to club‑system muscle, this belongs on it. It is not polite and it is not nostalgic. It is a document of a band listening hard to the noise of the world and pushing it back out as dance music with a raised eyebrow. That is why it endures, and why dropping the needle today still feels like tuning into a pirate signal that never quite went off air.