Covenant - Northern Light
Too often European EBM doesn't move me; the sound strikes me like the Pet Shop Boys gone goth and, frankly, that pairing is too much an oxymoron to be taken seriously. Covenant's Northern Light is working very hard to change my opinion. I've been wrestling with this record for a few weeks now, trying to figure out exactly why it has attached itself to me. It's like a piece of sticky tape stuck to the end of my finger: I keep trying to shake it off, but it stays there.
It may have something to do with a pair of lyrics: "We are submariners / Close to foreign shores" (from "Monochrome") and "A choir full of longing / We call our ships to port" ("Call the Ships to Port"). Northern Light moves me in that it is the soundtrack for a single sailor in a metal boat high in the Arctic Ocean. The songs are filled with the melancholy of the pale Arctic sky and water, the solitude and introspection of the unbroken horizon, and the constant longing for some sort of human connection.
Running throughout Northern Light is the theme of loneliness, this perpetuation sense of separation. While a number of the songs are lost in the despair of interpersonal disconnects, there a few which have their eye turned towards the future. "Monochrome," "Prometheus," and "We Want Revolution" all cry out for the unknown possibilities, a release from the limitations of the present. "Start your engines / Blow your fuses / Burn the bridges for the future." And, even in these tracks, there is that pervading sense of isolation -- that, in our current existence, we are cut off from each other -- and the only possibility for our survival will come from the destruction of the barriers between us. The music plays counterpoint to the melancholy of the vocals, driving beat structures and anthemic melodies which speak of the potential of release from the oubliette raised around us.
Naturally, this being EBM -- electronic body music, another genre pigeon-hole which has become too diffuse to be useful -- the tracks combine these two elements: vocal manifestos straight out of the Romantic period and pop song constructs infused with machine music accuracy and big beat propulsions. What sets Covenant apart from the crowd of kids with a drum machine, rack of keyboard synthesizers, and vocoder is the intelligence and precision behind the work. Eskil Simonsson could easily be the Swedish David Gahan, while Joakim Montelius and Clas Nachmanson craft the layered programming; the trio have been together since the mid-'80s and have evolved into "sound managers," a term they use to describe themselves, having graduated from their earlier label of "noise adventurers." The result of their skillful management is Northern Light, a polished and mature sounding record which encompasses both a minimalist futurepop design and a goth-trance dance floor aesthetic.
In "Call the Ships to Port" Eskil intones: "A single spark of passion can change a man forever / A moment in a lifetime is all it takes to break him / A fraction of a heartbeat made us what we are." In the end, these three lines sum up why the record has gone all sticky tape on me. File under: machine music romanticism.
Covenant
Metropolis Records [2002]
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