I believe I first heard Laibach during my indoctrination into so-called industrial music towards my latter years of college. Having been lured in by the post-pop iteration of Ministry, early Skinny Puppy and the Revolting Cocks, I started to branch out and investigate some of the genre’s arguably less accessible antecedents, from progenitors like Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle to New York City’s own contingent, featuring SWANS, Foetus (yes, I realize not actually from New York, pedants) and less style-conscious acolytes like Missing Foundation and Cop Shoot Cop. But, before all of that, I somehow latched onto Laibach — a band ultimately with only rudimentary similarities to all of the above.
Sure, they shared a penchant for big, ponderous percussion and impossibly deep, basso-profundo vocals, not unlike early SWANS, but where the latter was driven by raging self-loathing, cruelty and depravity, Laibach was entirely different.
Based, as I dimly understood it, at the time, out of Slovenia, Laibach was some sort of musical offshoot of a high-concept art collective that traded in the vagaries of propaganda, mixing and matching images and iconography from fascism and totalitarianism, but flecked with an archly sardonic world view. Much like several of my favorite bands before and since, exactly *what* Laibach was all about was never explicitly stated, or at least not easily gleaned from simply a cursory examination of their art and music. Given the propensity of other bands in the industrial community like Throbbing Gristle, Death in June, Current 93 and NON flirting — and, in some cases, embracing — not only the imagery but also the ideology of these elements, many assumed Laibach — who dressed in a decidedly Teutonic variant of military garb — were doing much the same thing. Understandably, this made a lot of people uneasy.
But unlike the swastika-sporting early British punks, the mookish skinheads of the National Front and the tasteless “pranks” and provocation of Boyd Rice’s afore-cited NON, the concepts and aesthetics meted out by Laibach were and remain far more complex and deliberate. As wry as their conceptual cousins in bands like The Residents, there was very assuredly a method to their particular brand of madness.
The very name Laibach was a clue, albeit one that was probably lost on most Western teenage music geeks in the mid-80s. The German name for Slovenia’s capital city of Ljubljana, “Laibach” is a reference to the Nazi occupation of the band’s homeland in WWII. The frankly disquieting art depicting a swastika formed out of battle-axes on the back cover of the band's third album, Opus Dei, didn’t exactly clear a lot of questions up for a lot of folks (and earned me no shortage of raised eyebrows from my fellow college disc jockeys at WDUB, who were more versed in Little Feat and Ziggy Marley than any obliquely ironic Slovenian industrial music). The design in question, however, was the appropriated work of noted Dadaist ANTI-Nazi artist John Heartfield who also served as the band’s conceptual forebear, who made a point of weaponizing art.
Long story short, Laibach were not Nazis. Not even slightly.
Back in 1987, when I first heard them via frankly hilarious and knowingly ridiculous covers of Queen’s “One Vision” and Opus’ “Life is Life,” I honestly didn’t consider the notion of them being actual fascists. They seemed a little too slyly camp for all that. There was a subtle wink to their music in a sound and aesthetic seemingly bereft of any semblance of subtlety. That their next endeavors involved equally preposterous covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the entire Let It Be album by ye olde Beatles (sadly minus the title track) only furthered my suspicions that Laibach were not always to be taken deathly seriously nor completely at face value.
But hey, circa 1988, if you ever needed to clear a room with all speed, throw on some Laibach and people would be scrambling for the exits for any number of laughably misconstrued reasons. The girlfriend of a friend of mine actually stopped talking to me for a while after I slipped "Auf der Lüneburger Heide” (a traditional German drinking song popularized by Germany’s Heino) covered by Laibach on Let It Be in place of “Maggie May” on a mixtape for them. To be fair, she also had a huge problem with “Wunderbar” by British comedy-punks,Tenpole Tudor, which she decried as a “skinhead anthem.” Not really. But I digress.
Putting to one side Laibach’s potentially problematic presentation, their music was frequently unwieldy and stentorian, punctuated by pounding drums and vocalist Milan Fras' (a dead-ringer for Freddie Mercury, when he sported the mustache) gutteral growl. Laibach anthems would stride manfully out of your speakers like behemoths with a sonic heft that bordered on the physical. Live performances by the band were marked by envelope-pushing levels of amplification and blinding floodlights aimed directly at the audience’s eye level. Even if you “got” them, Laibach were absolutely never going to make it easy for you.
I kept up, for a while, but largely decamped by the mid-90’s in the wake of Jesus Christ Superstars. As much as I enjoyed their covers of the Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and Prince’s “The Cross,” I was starting to feel like I had all the Laibach I really needed.
In the absence of my fandom, however, Laibach branched out further, scoring films, staging elaborate stage productions and embracing orchestral elements. This summer, they released a sprawling retrospective boxed set called Revisited (although not naming a Laibach box set LAIBOX seems like a truly missed opportunity). While duly intrigued, I could not rationalize dropping the money involved for a multi-disc Laibach box set, however fetchingly packaged.
Then came “Smrt Za Smrt.”
As part of the Revisited project, Laibach went back and reinterpreted/augmented much of their previous music. Earlier this week saw them release the below video for “Smrt Za Smrt,” a track from 1984.
No cheeky cover version of a beloved pop music standard, “Smrt Za Smrt” (Slovenian for “Death for Death”) is a harrowing rumination on absolute retribution. It is ponderous and powerful in both sound and sentiment, leant immeasurable impact by the visuals of the video that perfectly match the expansive, cinematic scope of the re-imagined track.
I might have to save up for that box set after all.
Recent Comments