There are good Laibach gigs, and then there are "get a Malevich cross tattooed on your face and apply for NSK citizenship the minute the house lights go up" Laibach gigs.
Veliki brat vas gleda
This was n0teeth's third and easily favourite Laibach show so far. We've seen them playing a Volk-heavy set at a festival in Germany (one of two sets after the roof collapsed on Feindflug and the show had to proceed in a space that was half the size of the original). We've seen them at Village Underground, on the Spectre tour. And last night we saw them at the Islington Assembly Hall, an elegant art deco joint befitting Laibach's panache, pomp and pretension, performing tunes from what n0teeth considers the golden era.
An aside, which I'll try to keep brief: Opus Dei is arguably the greatest Laibach album. It's not just that it's mostly made of original material rather than covers, it's that the material in question is so quintessentially Laibach, so instantly identifiable as Proper Industrial Music. Setlist scuttlebutt ahead of the show suggested the tour was focusing on that album in particular - coinciding with the often genuinely brilliant reworkings released last year. This is probably the briefest I've ever managed to keep my tuppenceworth on this album. Fans and friends know I can go on.
The first half of the set (which was split neatly in two, very theatrical!) focused on pre-Opus Dei material: the proper early, grimy, dare I say humourless industrial gear Laibach first emerged from the coal mines of Trbovlje with in the early 80s. (That era, too, got the "revisited" treatment a few years ago.)
Four people bashed out Vier Personen as we eagerly awaited the arrival of Milan Fras, the thin grey duke. And there were certainly some other interesting new takes on very old material like Brat Moj (for which they were joined by Swedish singer Marina Mårtensson, whose formidable set of pipes would be deployed to even greater effect later on in the set). But "interesting" doesn't get the crowd going, unlike the final number before the intermezzo: a thundering rendition of Alle Gegen Alle that would've done our fallen soldier Gabi DAF proud.
A man stood near us whooped and hollered and shrieked in guttural German and possibly Slovenian throughout. Sadly this entertainingly chaotic presence would be absent during the next act, apparently removed by security for having too much fun. A reminder that fascists don't usually dress in uniforms like Laibach's: sometimes they wear earpieces and high vis jackets.
Is it cheating to say it's the best Laibach gig you've ever been to when they played your favourite album of theirs in its entirety?
If Opus Dei is the album which best represents the overall Laibach experience then The Great Seal must be the song that best encapsulates their genius. A covers medley, of sorts, of several things which aren't songs, strictly speaking: the NSK anthem, the US national anthem and Winston Churchill's "Fight them on the beaches" speech.
To butcher a certain Russian premier's oft-quoted soundbite about the USSR: anyone who doesn't get choked up at the juxtaposition of Churchill's fighting words against a backdrop of communist partisans reclaiming Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation has no heart; anyone who overlooks Churchill's eventual betrayal of Yugoslavia's Greek neighbours to fascism has no brain.
The combination of early original material (from the Nova Akropola era) and the original-ish bombast of Opus Dei with that Foreigner cover they added to their set last tour made this the perfect Laibach show. The ideal mix of industrial Laibach and tongue-in-cheek-but-still-genuinely-moving pop covers Laibach - with a sobering reminder of the current brutalised state of Gaza at the end, to the sound of a Billie Holliday song transformed into futurist war sounds poem. Unlike certain other industrial "provocateurs" (think camo netting and acoustic guitars) Laibach never tell you what to think.
Do we need Laibach more than ever? Yes, but not because these troubled times we're living through are the end of the end of history (Fukuyama get fucked). Rather, we need the Slovenians' mordant satirical humour because without it, we're stuck with fifth-rate standup comics "speaking truth to power" by wearing novelty Donald Trump wigs on SNL.
And, on a typically petty n0teeth note, we need more old school martial bombast to remind the younger wave that industrial music is about creating the maximum amount of din from the minimum of gear, not the other way round.
