Laibach have been on a winning form since 2017’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, that oozing dark matter and gravelly gravitas of yore gloriously reconfigured, later thrown around on the sonically saturated Wir Sind Das Volk.
Now this latest offering, Sketches Of The Red Districts, sees them returning to the conflict-ridden knot of a country that was Yugoslavia, taking from it two points of reference (both from the band’s home turf of Trbovlje): the genus of their first concert in 1980 and the fascist uprising of 1924.
A soundtrack that right from the offset anchors an atmospherically dark canvas, ominously pulsing in pock-marked prisms. The promo comes as one long track, and even if the final item is in fact divided up into individual tracks, this works rather well as an uninterrupted flow, mimicking the restless unease of a troubled nation.
Like Wir Sind Das Volk, this continues to be painted in three dimensions as sound flies in at you like shrapnel. The tension is teased, expectation played with, suddenly beams with bulleted techno funk, gets gloriously brutalised, then cuts back to some shimmering focus; then guest vocalist Kaja Blazinsek funnels in. A hushed seduction flanked by shadowy provocations and pulverised in bursts of ugly. That female vox returning later to Slavically proclaim over a mausoleum of maned musicality. A digitised brilliance that beams plenty, bleeds out in a crater-torn windswept landscape before lumbering back into some sweet hostility.
A dystopian verve leading you into the splashy bracketed wreckage of a song that is “Lepo Krasno”. That cavernous male voice mixing beauty and horror into some glistening snake-charmed flesh, all spoke-ridden and gritty-eyed in the morning light, demising on the droning corridors of the outro — a fucking beautiful record.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
