uoflnmu's Full Review: Northern Lights by Covenant (Techno)
Covenant, not to be confused with the Dutch band Covenant or Norwegian band Kovenant (both gothic/black metal), is one of the bigger acts on Metropolis Records (The New York Yankees of industrial and industrial rock). Having moved steadily away from their industrial sound of "Cryotank" and poppiness of the runaway club hit record "United States of Mind," Covenant gives the listener a strong new wave / dark ambient product with this release.
Covenant now stands as a standard bearer of one of the myriad of techno sub-genres EBM. EBM, for those not "hip" enough to be in the circles that throw around terms like that, stands for electronic body movement--which admittedly is almost as vaccous a term as "alternative music." EBM, aka "futurepop," is--as far as I can tell--a revival movement of 80's new wave pop led by industrial musicians. (I'm not hip enough to be able to draw the line between EBM and "coldwave," which--I guess--has more of a dark and foreboding vibe to it.)
"Northern Lights" is a very accessible release, without the immense amount of pretention that surrounds releases from futurepop darlings Apoptygma Berzerk and VNV Nation. The closest mainstream analogue for this record would be middle period Depeche Mode, as Covenant boasts soothing semi-androgenous club anthem vocals, very dancy beats, and obvious European sophistication.
"We Stand Alone" is one of the obvious stand-out tracks on this record. It boasts a catchy key pattern that pervades through the song and makes very good use of different layers of tracks and frequency to build intensity. It's really a fairly straight-forward club anthem, but its simplicity is quite refreshing. I can't emphasize that enough. I hear so many damned dance tunes that could be salvaged by just throwing out countless tracks of ambient noise, superfluous samples, and other such nonsense. It's just beautiful simplicity.
The vocals on this album are consistently strong. Often times industrial artists monkey around with filters over the voice to make the the overall product a more "distopian future" sounding track, or pump tons and tons of delay or chorus on the singer. Vocal effects are minimized here, and would be entirely superfluous even if they were there. Eskil Simonsson (lead vocalist) has a gifted voice, and tends to stay fairly savvy with the lyrics. It's far too tempting to get too intellectual or adolescent with the lyrics in this setting, and Covenant resists this urge.
Covenant is tasteful. Covenant is sophisticated. No crunching guitars or overtures to dark lords. Just heady dancy goodness.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.