LAIBACH レコード& CD

Review: Laibach's Opus Dei is a quintessential addition to any music collection, offering a unique blend of uplifting yet disturbing melodies that are both thought-provoking and slightly unsettling. The album's standout feature is its vocalist, whose grunty voice adds a captivating charm to each track. The musicians play with confidence and courage, infusing each song with depth and complexity. With every listen, new layers and nuances emerge, making each track a fresh experience. Opus Dei serves as perfect background music and its overall flavor and sparse yet flavorful composition make it a must-listen for music enthusiasts. An essential release from one of industrial music's most important bands.

Review: Ever-changing Slovenian collective Laibach seems to have mellowed with age, with the band's inherent desire to court controversy (see their 2015 performances in North Korea for a relatively recently example) currently curtailed. Love Is Still Alive, which marks their first new music since the release of last year's well-received album Wir Sind das Volk, is actually an "extension" of the music they wrote to soundtrack the 2019 film 'Iron Sky -The Coming Race'. It is, they say, a "trip through space music genres of recent decades" (albeit with bonus nods to country, pop and so on) that loosely tells the story of a spaceship full of post-apocalyptic survivors making their way across the solar system. It's a lot of fun, all told, with the band expertly showcasing the breadth of their musical knowledge as well as skip-fulls of imagination.