Thirty-seven years after its release, Opus Dei remains a cult album. Laibach's first album on the Mute label, it put the sulphurous Slovenian band on the world map, attracting fans who laughed at their martial hijackings of Opus' Live is Life and Queen's One Vision, a lawsuit brought by the Catholic organisation Opus Dei which the band won, a few dubious admirers and equally effective polemics to promote their music. Suddenly more accessible, Laibach had become a provocation for the whole world.
The collective chose to celebrate this album with two releases in 2024. First, a ravishing remastered version of Opus Dei at the beginning of the year, accompanied by several bonuses including the beautiful Geburt Einer Nation - Eine Richtung und ein Volk Version and a number of wilder live recordings; and then the subject of this review, Opus Dei Revisited. This exercise in self-cover is not new to Laibach and they already practised it with the magnificent Revisited, paying tribute to their early work (review).
The exercise is more perilous than it seems. Laibach's first works were made up of noisy, aggressive music, recalling the repressed past of collaboration during the Second World War at a time when Slovenian nationalism was developing in a fading Yugoslavia. Revisited had no trouble offering very different versions, more in line with the band's current style. Opus Dei, on the other hand, shifted the focus away from this theme for the first time by taking an interest in Western popular music hits, seemingly unpoliticized and therefore so easy to hijack to showcase a new totalitarianism. The record thus inaugurated a long line of Laibach covers of popular anthems, subverting the codes of the music industry rather than simply countering them in the manner of Throbbing Gristle, making the Slovenian band famous. The difficulty is that the turn had already been taken by the time of this record, so the new versions of Opus Dei Revisited risk being compared with the old ones more than they did with Revisited. How did Laibach avoid this pitfall?
Let's just say straight away that the martial ferocity of the first Opus Dei is nowhere to be found on this album: the faster tempos, Milan's acerbic screams and the harshest mechanical noises have remained on the original album. To get the most out of them, however, we can't recommend highly enough the live versions that appear on the second disc of the remastered version. On the other hand, the tracks retain their heaviness, but in a different way: Laibach slows down their tempos, loads their tracks with reverb and lets disturbing silences blossom. Less violent, the album becomes much more gloomy. In terms of sound, we're surprised to hear saturated guitars on several occasions, like a massive ornament crushing us from time to time. As you'd expect, there are also soft, low-key synth strings and Marina Mårtensson's lyrical vocals, wrapping the martial rhythms in velvet. It's an unsettling experience, but Laibach have succeeded in offering us a truly different album. And that's not all: in 2024, masses are not seduced by a display of brute force, but by knowing how to be suave and spectacular.
The new version of Geburt Einer Nation, Queen's One Vision transformed into a grandiloquent nationalist anthem, still leaves us rather sceptical: while the grandiloquence remains, the kitsch synthesiser that dominates the track here takes away much of its force, while not distancing it sufficiently from the original. As for the revisited version of F.I.A.T., it's so close to the first, with the exception of a few synthetizer pads, that it's hard to identify what exactly has changed, even if it's still just as enjoyable. On the other hand, Opus Dei Revisited works very well on the most transformed tracks: Leben Heißt Leben and Leben-Tod take on a creepy charm that's both enticing and menacing. Marina Mårtensson's performance is particularly commendable, as Mina Špiler has already given us a marvellous live version of Leben-Tod. The Swedish-Slovenian singer's interpretation is less martial, but nonetheless full of despair. In another remarkable transformation, The Great Seal has become a beautiful piece of electronic nostalgia, an enchanted evocation of some propaganda ideal. There's no particular surprise in the song Opus Dei, which closes the album, the famous cover of Opus, started in English and finished in German as Laibach played it live in 2016, but it's still just as good!
But there's something even more interesting. The most implacable tracks on Opus Dei were not the covers that made it famous, but Transnational, a sort of evil double of Kraftwerk's Trans Europa Express, a fast, repetitive war fury, and the cruel joy of the sinister How The West Was Won, a virilistic, aristocratic anthem. The revisited version of Transnational is slower and heavy with intimidating reverberation, but more importantly, lyrics have been added; as on the original, Milan Fras enumerates traditional virtues in a voracious tone, except that meanwhile Marina Mårtensson enunciates universal human rights, proclaiming more than she sings... Should we see in this contrast the two faces of modern Western nations? What is certain is that Laibach creates confusion. How The West Was Won, for its part, has become ravishing under the effect of Marina's singing, which enchants the violence still present in the music and lyrics. You're seduced and uncomfortable at the same time - it's wonderful!
Laibach's work on revisiting their cult album ends here, but on the second CD we can still enjoy Rico Conning's remixes of the original material, which never fail to surprise, with a particular delight in Leben Heißt Leben.
The gamble paid off: Laibach showed us a very different version of Opus Dei, in which we can see the reflection of questions we might ask ourselves about the world today through the hijacking of Western pop and rock codes. For this very reason, Opus Dei Revisited will not appeal to every fan of the original album. From then on, the comparison makes little sense, except for this: Laibach continue to master the art of provocation and misappropriation, whatever their musical guise.
