Laibach Hits Bleak Notes of Oppression

Rock ‘n’ roll is the ultimate expression of liberation and individuality, right?

Not to Laibach, a highly influential Slovenian industrial-rock/performance-art band that has spent nearly two decades trying to demonstrate exactly the opposite. Rock, it maintains, is a vehicle of oppression and uniformity, part of a 20th century trinity alongside fascism and organized religion.

It was hard to argue with that after the group’s show Thursday at Perversion in Hollywood--its first L.A. performance since 1992. Fronted by impossibly low, gravelly voiced Milan Fras--garbed in Eastern Orthodox priestly vestments--the quintet spent most of the show on its specialty of recent years: transforming rock songs ostensibly about freedom (i.e. Queen’s “One Vision”) into bleak manifestoes of conformity.

The latest phase, represented on the new album “Jesus Christ Superstars,” turns songs intended to evoke spiritual mystery (the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber song that provided the title, Prince’s “The Cross”) into tracts of force-fed dogma. Thursday night it was astonishing just how easily the material was pummeled into submission, trampled in this triumph of the will into martial, electro-metal hymns that utilize every color in the musical spectrum from black to dark gray.

It’s easy to understand how people raised in a country dominated most of this century by Soviets and Nazis would wonder why anyone in the free world would willingly line up behind leaders, be they rock stars, politicians or priests. By comparison, Marilyn Manson’s current use of church and Nazi imagery seems like mere bratty nose-thumbing at authority.

And you can dance--or goose-step--to this.