Laibach are a Slovenian group, also featuring members from former-Yugoslavia, but since they perform as a collective I couldn’t give you any names for band members on this album, although Dejan Knez and Ivan “Jani” Novak seem to be long-serving members.
They take tunes like Queen’s One Vision or Opus’ Live Is Life and turn them into sinister Teutonic industrial marches – Live Is Life in particular gets turned into the track Leben Heiβt Leben and the slower English-language Opus Dei. One Vision is turned into Geburt Einer Nation (Birth of a Nation). Other tracks borrow elements, but are all broadly similar “neo-classical industrial dark wave” as Wikipedia classifies the album. Trans-National, for example, is some heavy electronica as if Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express were some post-industrial hell-monster of a train, like the Snowpiercer or Rodney Matthews’ painting Heavy Metal Hero (see also Iron Council by China Miéville). It feels like the kind of music that the Imperium in the Warhammer 40,000 universe would produce – both futuristic and mediaeval at the same time.
Comparisons to Rammstein are inevitable, especially thanks to singer Milan Fras’ deep voice reminiscent of Nordic trolls labouring in underground forges, and the stern German delivery of the lyrics. Rammstein acknowledge some inspiration, but also both bands draw on a combination of Northern European mythic archetypes and the authoritarian brutalist art of the mid-Twentieth Century. Laibach employ imagery based on fascist posters, but also that of the Soviet Union. Consider that at this time Slovenia and Yugoslavia were both still under the USSR, even if the cracks were becoming extremely wide, and were something of a subversive force in their own country. By taking authoritarian concepts like stirring martial music, and using them on throwaway pop-songs, they were not only parodying the self-importance of authoritarians, but also making some very interesting music.
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