Few groups captured incipient dread quite as well as Cabaret Voltaire. While their industrial peers like Throbbing Gristle and SPK went for shock factor, a jolt to the nervous system to shake the listener out of complacency, Cabaret Voltaire’s music simmered with angst and paranoia; later, beyond the mid-1980s when they moved closer to the dancefloor and pop, that tendency would be leavened by a relative clarity in the production, but on Red Mecca, it’s the murk that makes the music so powerful, and I’ve heard few albums that sound quite so much like they’re oozing from the speakers. It’s partly due to the ectoplasmic leakages from the instruments like guitar, clarinet, horns, organ, that smear across the stereo spectrum; it’s also in Stephen Mallinder’s stentorian delivery on songs like the epic “A Thousand Ways”, a song that seems to spiral in on itself continually, an ouroboros of a track. With a title inspired by contemporaneous geopolitical events in the Middle East, Red Mecca has Cabaret Voltaire channeling conflict and crisis into nine songs full of unresolved tension.