Laibach – Alamut

Mute

I’ve been waiting for another symphonic blowout from Laibach — Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra and Wir Sind Das Volk all crafted a superb sense of menace and ill-ease, but the magnitude of this new album blows all previous releases clean out of the water.

In scope and ambition, Alamut is a remarkable piece of work, performed live at a former Crusader castle in Ljubljana in 2022. Involving the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, the Human-Voice Ensemble vocal group from Tehran, the Gallina Women’s Choir and AccordiOna, the canvas full and sonicly rich, expertly conducted by Iranian-born Navid Goharib and of course all superbly subverted by Laibach.

Loving the Igor Stravinsky Rite Of Spring surge that greets you first, all brooding discord and rumbling timpani-smashing headlong into the red to bask meditatively, shimmer a sorrowful soak of interval strings. A knife-dance of palpable tension, snare-peppered and spiralling. An atonal glare and timpani return that slams down a destructive wow before slipping back into an undulating murmur. The contrasting currency that spears so beautifully throughout these two discs holds you solidly to its turbinate narrative.

“Secret Gardens”‘s glide of shifting perspectives sonorously sewn to this glorious smokey Islamic chant. Three or more voices feeling round each other in over-toned Persian lullaby, rupturing into an appetising cacophony of industrialised shards that is “Fedayeen”. Laibach making a dramatic and violent entrance, tearing through the retracted orchestral swipes with a nailing gallop of bent-up percussive and red-raw electronics.

The screeching trumpeted insatiability of it all, with gasping abstracts and coin spilled metal … those glowing ricocheting dynamics and vocal yelps throwing your eyes wide open. Honestly, this the best I’ve heard from the band, and just one of the many highlights Alamut has to offer.

Unusually it’s not until “Meditation I” that Milan Fras’s distinctive swagger hits to a bell-toned chime, his tyrannical baritone holding a light to Hassan I Sabbah’s dialogue, while his humble subjects carpet the background in a chattering disquiet of vocal abstracts. Things fold sonically around, unexpectedly leap forward, rowdy and wrinkled, a percussively bookmarked track that leaves Fras the last grumbling word.

AccordiOna, a fifty-plus women’s accordion orchestra, make a super-strong introduction to “War”. Another album star, twined with aircraft drone and orchestral discolour that thrusts the soil into the sky — a white hot, all consuming gratuity nipped suddenly in the bud. Wow doesn’t begin to express it.

This is a fascinating listen, visceral, passionate, undeniably haunting, its sparrowing charm spearing a György Ligeti-esque intensity and swollen ugliness. The light airy flutter of voices and electronics of “Doors Of Perception” suddenly chaotic and jolted to swim back in a twilight, an uneasy ambience it shares with the barbecued magnificence of “Metaverse”. All terminating on the Swans-like blackening of “Meditation II & Epilogue”.

And what a finale it is too, a locusting swarm of ill-intent teetering in Test Dept metallics and buckling crescendo that sees Milan Fras’s voice returning, stoking antichrist to a corrosive curdling, finally souring on the sweet Persian hum of choiring voices intersected by brooding sporadics from Fras.

Honesty Laibach, you’ve outdone yourself here – Alamut is a striking masterpiece.

-Michael Rodhamn-Heaps-