You sense you’re not exactly in for a luvved-up grooveathon when an album’s lyric sheet features such nuggets as: "Oblast" and "Our authority is that of the people", but Slovenia’s LAIBACH immediately stood out from the pack in the 1980s with their young party member image and slightly decadent Eastern European chic in the years just prior to the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
They also did themselves no harm by taking a subversive demolition ball to the likes of THE BEATLES’ "Let It Be" and OPUS’s "Life Is Life". UNCUT magazine recently exhumed their still spine-chilling cover of THE ROLLING STONES’ already unearthly "Sympathy For The Devil" too.
Now re-issued by Cherry Red and featuring the enhanced promo footage of "Drzava" (that’s "The State" to you and me pal!) in gloriously backlit black ‘n’ white, 1985’s "Nova Akropola" (or "The New Acropolis") doesn’t feature any obvious Western jukebox hits realigned, but gives credence to the theories that LAIBACH were: 1) actually a fantastic, cerebrally-challenging pre-techno dance outfit, or: 2) an elaborate art conceit difficult to stomach in one sitting.
The dramatic "Drzava" video makes one thing abundantly clear: that LAIBACH’s music is eminently filmic – something immediately borne out by the unsettling opener "Vier Personen": all nervous rimshots, grand pianos trundling downstairs and the very real sound of sampled gunfire.
There are several other deranged successes, too. Not least the (everything’s relative!) almost commercial stomp of "Die Liebe" and – even without the visuals – "Drzava", a bizarrely affecting diatribe stuffed with hurricane force trumpet serenades. Perhaps best of all, though, is "Panorama", a genuinely epic soundscape intercut with an English-version voice over of ‘Slav dictator Tito’s speeches – all the spookier when you consider his was the one Comecon regime Stalin could never truly tame.
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Elsewhere, though, for all the ideological intrigue, things do go seriously awry from the listener’s point of view. For all its’ biblical excesses, "Nova Akropola" itself – apparently a message from the devil – is an industrial strength drone (surely Old Nick has better tunes than this?) and for all the horror of the lyrics, "Vojna Poema" ("War Poem") is even worse to struggle through. Given the fact that compared with LAIBACH’s Jan Novak, such gravel garglers like ex-NAPALM DEATH man Lee Dorrian seem like Fozzie Bear doesn’t exactly bode well either. Besides, the cutting edge technology in 1985, such as DMX, Fairlights and Emulators (regularly employed here) has not lasted at all well.
Consequently, like say SONIC YOUTH in the past, LAIBACH can sometimes work better purely on a theoretical level, but as at least five of the tracks comprising "Nova Akropola" prove, few have done subversive and uncompromising as well as Ljubljana’s leading lights.
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