Album Review: Ministry - "Filth Pig" (1996)

Ministry

Filth Pig

1996

Psalm 69 comes out. Suddenly, for what seems like five minutes, Ministry becomes one of the biggest bands on the face of the earth for every metalhead and angry alterna-rocker kid who ever watched MTV. Lots of festival-headlining and sold-out arena touring. Soon it became time to give the people a follow-up. What was delivered obviously did not fit the needs of the public, who responded to it with scorn. Personally, I'm not sure what their expectations were, because for a band with as much evolution between albums as Ministry, Filth Pig doesn't seem like much of a leap from Psalm 69. People just don't like change, it seems.

Being one of the most maligned albums in Ministry's catalog, I suppose it's not exactly difficult to see why the fanbase responded so poorly to it. Its sound has become a sort of plodding industrial doom metal, with sinister Black Sabbath riffs and thick, sludgy songwriting and production. No speed solos here. The band had experimented with this to an extent on the previous album with "Scarecrow", now most of the tracks follow a similar format, but with lower tuning. Many fan reviews I have seen criticize the album for a perceived lack of electronics or samples, but they're used just as much as the previous album. They're simply more subtle, spaced-apart, or buried in the deceptively multilayered mix, and they attain a very eerie feel for the careful listener. Basically, where a few of the previous albums said more of something like "sci-fi action sequence", this one groans more to the tune of "depressed crackhouse visit and subsequent overdose scene". Kind of like a more radio-friendly, more-polished and more complexly-mixed industrial Eyehategod, if you will.

Our lineup for tonight includes (of course) Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker as primary songwriters and men-about-town, with Louis Svitek and the ever-trusty Mike Scaccia on guitar and Duane Buford, previously of side project Revolting Cocks, on electronics duties. Longtime drummer Bill Rieflin recorded about half of the album but quit to head for greener pastures (particularly, to play on some incredible Swans albums) and was replaced for the other half with drummer familiar to the Touch & Go scene in the 80's, Rey Washam (previously of noise rock bands Scratch Acid and Rapeman, among others). Considering, like with most Ministry records, you don't really get much of a sense of who did what and where, it's hard to rate the band on individual performances, but Rieflin is excellent as usual in the tracks he plays on, and it's kind of funny and odd that the album pretty much plays directly against Scaccia's strengths as a guitarist, being slow and trudging as opposed to the speedy technical thrash-wank he's known for, but the guitar all sounds good so I suppose it worked out.

There are some very good tracks on here... The first track, "Reload", opens the album with a track whose tempo almost creates the feeling of whiplash compared to the rest of the record. It's a manic, frenzied song that sounds like the score to a Peckinpah gunfight scene on acid. The title track, immediately following, is a crushingly powerful track that should be a doom metal classic. It has an amazing evil riff and a wonderful use of harmonica in one part. "The Fall" is another great slab of doom metal that almost sounds like a Type O Negative song, with a sweet abrasive riff and beautiful piano work. And of course there's the big favorite of the album, the heavy reworking of Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay".

The songs evoke this odd feeling, like visiting a dive bar in a small desert town like a rejected child of Vegas, getting extremely intoxicated, and witnessing (or participating in) an orgy of violent criminal behavior. Like A Clockwork Orange high on heroin in addition to what was in that milk the droogs were drinking. Al Jourgensen's lyrics are at perhaps their most abstract and hopeless, most seeming to be about struggles with addiction or other things of that nature. There's certainly political commentary on here but it's way more subtle than usual with this bunch. One of my favorite things about the album is how, as I said earlier, it's more deeply-layered than people give it credit for being. This is really an album that rewards paying attention. The deep rolling bass and the grinding guitar and the small echoing guitars wailing off to the side and the dim, tinny samples being rhythmically repeated in the background and Al Jourgensen's static-riddled voice scratching the air give the album a very amazing, distinctive atmosphere that's easy to get absolutely sucked into.

Really, I find the story with this album to be tragic... It was so horribly panned, alongside the band's other few successive albums' attempts to try new things, that when Barker jumped ship, Jourgensen felt the need to try and revisit the successful format of Psalm 69, only make it more mainstream sounding... And what's more, that he found success doing that, and so did it again... And again after that... And allowed Ministry's usually-evolving sound to stagnate in mainstream mediocrity. I still love this album... You've got to be more in a certain mood (or state of mind) to get the absolute most out of this album than you would with some of the previous stuff, but it's a great record all the time. And it's better than the whole Bush trilogy.

RATING: 4/5

Album Review: Godflesh - "Godflesh" (1988)

Godflesh

Godflesh

1988

Miserable, misanthropic, painful. These are words I would use to describe Godflesh's debut. A lot like the Swans, actually.

The music is an excruciatingly slow doom-trudge through a disturbing industrial nightmare. Imagine Eraserhead in album form. Also kinda like the Swans, now that I think of it. Seriously, listen to Cop or Greed, and this is pretty similar. Not that that is a bad thing.

The music is pretty simple, but simplicity is all this needs. At the front you've got Justin Broadrick's tortured wailing and some wonderful guitar work that makes some of the best use of feedback I've ever heard. Then you have G.C. Green's booming, roaring basslines, and some subtle (and occasionally less so) electronics duties split between the two of them. Half the time one or both of the instruments sound more like some kind of large machine than a musical instrument, which is great.

So, we make our way through the tracks... They're kind of same-ish in places, which is kind of a problem Godflesh has sometimes, but they're still just fantastic so it's quite easily forgiven. Some stand out for me though for whatever reason. My favorite is "Godhead." One of G.C.'n'Justin's best.

As bonus tracks, we've got two long remixes. "Wounds", the first of them, I especially like, even if most people don't seem to like it. It's an awesome industrial dance sort of thing not too much unlike something you migh hear from Wax Trax.

Overall, I just have to give this album a good score. At first I didn't like it because it was a little *too* noisy for me (I had gotten used to the cleaner sound of stuff like Pure) but it grew on me fast, and now it's one of my favorite albums. I just can't resist going back to this frequently. The grinding bass and guitar, the oppressive production atmosphere and Broadrick's pained vocals just make it perfect. In fact, as someone who *generally* doesn't find Broadrick that great a vocalist (as much as I like his music) I've got to say I think his vocals work best on here by far - doing a Michael Gira-esque moan that sounds like some death-orgasm.

It sucks that this is OOP. I had to fork over some fairly good coin for a copy of it myself (about the most I'd pay for one CD, in fact) but it was well worth it.

Broadrick and Green go on to do some truly fantastic stuff, and break away from the Swans worship to do more original things, but this is the one I always go back to.

RATING: 4/5

Album Review: Danzig - "5: Blackacidevil" (1996)

Danzig

Danzig 5: Blackacidevil

1996

What a fucking mess.

After give or take about 8 years of recording and touring for awesome albums with a strong, sturdy line-up, Danzig decided for whatever reason to fire all of them (except Joey Castillo, the drummer he'd had for a year or two at that point, and the only guy who hadn't been there since the beginning) and 'allow himself to evolve' (read: do what everyone else was doing at this time and pretend they're NIN/Ministry/Manson.) Now it's just Glenn, Joey, and a guy named Joseph Bishara (whose name I only recognize elsewhere from being credited for some NIN and Manson remixes) with some occasional reinforcement by others... But we'll get to that.

The new direction kind of abruptly comes out of nowhere. Where there was once stripped-down bluesy metal (though there had been more liberal use of production effects on How the Gods Kill and 4) there is now extremely derivative noisy, gothy electro-industrial/industrial metal. Now, don't get me wrong, I love industrial music. And musically, there are some good moments here. But frankly, it just doesn't sound very good or interesting for the most part. Combine that with the painfully bad lyrics, by far the worst Glenn has ever written, and it becomes a chore to listen to. There are lots of sounds that I like; clanging metallic percussion, grinding filtered guitar noises, spooky synthetic atmospheres, but more often than not with this album, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

It almost seems like Glenn was bent on sabotaging himself at this point. He had a lot of fans, and a lot of fans were let down by this album, which I can understand. I'm sure then he thought that playing this newfangled industrial music that all the MTV-watching goth kids were running to would be a good career move, but he fails at doing anything interesting or original with it, and even when he makes a song in this style that's not bad, he has to ruin it with terrible lyrics, as is the case of "7th House" or his cover of "Hand of Doom" (which, in his infinitely large ego, Glenn foolishly thought he could successfully rewrite.) Not even Alice in Chains strummer Jerry Cantrell's magical guitar chops on a few songs are able to overcome Glenn's overwrought GOTH EXPERIMENTAL INDOOSTRIAL crap.

That's really all there is to say about this album. I mean, I am pretty hard on it, but it's not the worst thing I've ever heard or anything. I will say this though, it's by far Danzig's worst album. But hey, at least the reissue has cool artwork.

RATING: 2/5

You are entering... The Scary Door

Want to know something that gets on my nerves? People who are of the opinion that, because I or somebody else takes an interest in something morbid or "taboo", we are psycho/sociopaths who must be avoided or looked down upon. Not even talking about wearing goth-attire or constantly musing about death and murder and suicide and stuff like that, but just... the people who act shitty to you just because you're interested in the way psychopaths' minds work, or you listen to unconvential music, or you like horror.

This also segues nicely into another thing that annoys me: people who think that, because you acknowledge, or expend thought on something, you are condoning it. Therefore, if you like dark music, you want to kill yourself; if you like horror films, you want to kill other people; if you examine demonic themes (even within a work that at its core takes a positive view on Christianity), you want to kill God... I've seen so many people condemn art that agrees with their fucking point of view as being "of the enemy" because it simply acknowledges whatever they disagree with in a more realistic way... or sometimes even for a more arbitrary reason. An example of this kind of thing would be how, after Ozzy Osbourne (a Christian who had religious themes in quite a bit of stuff he sang, contrary to popular belief) sang "Miracle Man", a very pointed song specifically condemning the hypocrisy of one Jimmy Swaggart (a televangelist who once condemned Osbourne and was later caught soliciting a prostitute), some figures in religious media made extremely defensive complaints about Ozzy mocking the noble practice of televangelism... after which, they condemned the hypocrisy of Jimmy Swaggart. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Album Review: Ministry - "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" (1989)

Ministry

The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste

1989

Let me get a few things out of the way here. First, Ministry is one of my favorite bands. Second, I am a huge fan of industrial music. That said... This, which is often considered to be Ministry's, or even industrial music's (or at least industrial rock/metal's) finest hour, doesn't take me to such heights of elation for some reason, even though I do like it. I feel that its reputation precedes it. Why is that? Well, I like the songs. I quite dislike "Test" but other than that I enjoy everything on here. However, this album's gestation and recording/production period was a chaotic mess and it shows here, to the point where, though the quality is fairly consistent, the album seems to fail as a cohesive work. It's certainly not a bad thing that there is a lot of experimentation with different styles, but it just doesn't work as well as it could. Feels like it could have been stitched together better.

This was the first album with the main team being the trio of Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker and Bill Rieflin (though poor Rieflin, as always with these guys, is not credited as an actual member of the band.) Also on board in various roles are Nivek Ogre, Chris Connelly, and several lesser-known people that Al and/or Paul decided to collaborate with. This creates the album's problem with feeling disjointed; different tracks had material written by different people, some parts were written or recorded for other, non-Ministry projects, and it has been said that during this time, Al became obsessed with the idea of being a 'puppet master' conducting a crowd of guest collaborators, rather than just putting his all into it and getting assistance where it was warranted.

Again, most of the songs themselves are good; "Thieves", "Burning Inside" and "Breathe" are excellent, fierce, militaristic industrial metal tracks. "Cannibal Song", "Faith Collapsing" and "Dream Song" are great examples of Ministry doing awesome atmospheric non-metal industrial stuff. "So What" is one of Ministry's crowning moments of awesome, so of course Al would try to credit himself with doing Connelly's excellent vocals on the song. The only one on here that I don't like to some extent is "Test". Fucking shitty rap-metal song with pitifully predictable lyrics. Fred Durst probably found a divine light of inspiration within the song, which provides me with another reason to want to knee Jourgensen in the groin.

The album provides probably the most abrupt shift in Ministry's style; all their albums prior to this had some kind of progression in sound, but this one is probably the biggest jump. While With Sympathy was poppy new wave, Twitch was new wavey electro-industrial, and the Land of Rape and Honey was electro-industrial with elements of metal here and there, this one is almost entirely metal, with a few post-punk and industrial (not electro-industrial) touches here and there. The synths are hugely downplayed, live drums feature on every track, the vocal style has entirely shifted to metal screams (except for "Cannibal Song" and "Test", of course.) This one sets the stage for the style Ministry would carry for the rest of its career, more or less. Not nearly as strong as its two predecessors and not quite as good as its follow-up, but still a good album... Just not the masterpiece it is made out to be.

RATING: 3.5/5