Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

It took us a while to get industrial pioneers Ministry in the Decibel Hall of Fame — classic case of the classic lineup hating each other’s classic guts. But enterprising staffer Chris Dick finally convinced the infamous “Book Club” (Paul Barker, Bill Rieflin, Chris Connelly) to sit down together and reminisce upon the bad old days alongside polarizing ringleader Al Jourgensen, and now we’ve got a satisfyingly blunt, insightful and acrimonious history of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

I seem to recall lobbying for The Land of Rape and Honey and/or Psalm 69 when Team dB was debating the apex of Ministry’s long run. Near the end of this HOF, Rieflin wisely notes that Mind is a transitional record between the two. Literally, yes, duh, but he’s underscoring how all over the place it is; and yet, it really does boast some of the most powerful hybrids of Ministry’s “phase B” and “C.” (“A” being the “Everyday Is Halloween” era, which we’ve all tried so hard to forget.) Honestly, though, I feel like this is an outfit that never quite captured a start-to-finish stone-cold classic. They admit as much in the piece, as the Book Club straight up obliterates the record’s penultimate industrial/hip-hop hybrid “Test” (Al’s idea). It’s much harder to fuck with “Thieves,” “So What” and “Burning Inside”—although Al certainly tries with the latter.

The good-times HOF is in the Skeletonwitch issue, obvs, but you tell us: Which Ministry album is at the top of your personal Hall of Fame? (Filth Pig will not get your knuckles smacked in this classroom.)

-AB

Yeah, you could just order Decibel’s November 2011 issue, which also features Alice Cooper, Machine Head, Chimaira, Brutal Truth, and an awesome Anaal Nathrakh flexi disc — but why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?

The thing about Ministry is, sure, they were innovative, and sure, their live show has a lot of cool lights and effects and shit, but I think their music gets real boring real fast. It falls under the category of “too much of the same too quickly.” To give a recent example: Remember that single “Lies, Lies, Lies” from 2006′s Rio Grande Blood? Catchy fucking song, but I was shocked to learn that it’s just barely over five minutes long — ’cause it’s just the same thing, over and over and over again, and consequently feels like it’s an hour. And their whole catalog is basically like that. I remember when Al Jourgensen insulted Trent Reznor as just some Ministrwannabe back in the day, thinking, “Well, if you ever write a song as good as ‘Head Like a Hole’ or ‘Hurt,’ you might sell that many records, too.”

That being said, you do have to give Jourgensen and company their spot in history… and director Douglas Freel’s new documentary about the band,  Fix: The Ministry Movie, does look like a lot of fun. Besides covering the project’s entire history, it features interviews with Reznor (!) and Maynard James Keenan, who, in the trailer below, is, I think, but I’m not positive, is making a reference to the abandoned Tapeworm project he had with Reznor.

ANYWAY, here’s the trailer. The movie is gonna be doing four screenings (at least so far) this month and next month across the U.S.; get the screening schedule after the jump.

Click to read more…

We just received the following press release here at the MetalSucks Mansion. I don’t usually like to just cut and paste press releases, but in this instance I feel like I need to do so in order to make my point. So:

Ministry’s Uncle Al Jourgensen is apparently in the Christmas spirit, having created a Christmas video “card” for you and his fans that is also his very first solo project.

Al and good buddy Mark Thwait (Mission UK, Peter Murphy, Mob Research), collaborated on “It’s Always Christmas Time,” a tribute to friend and band mate Paul Raven (Ministry, Killing Joke, Mob Research) on the two-year anniversary of his passing in 2007. With Christmas less than two weeks away, it’s Al’s way of spreading his very own brand of holiday cheer.

Okay. That all sounds fair enough. But then I watched the actual video in question:

Click to read more…

This new song from the Greatest Horror Director of All Time is actually called “What?” As in, “What? Is that Al Jourgensen singing?”

But, no, seriously. Is that Al Jourgensen singing? ‘Cause if it ain’t, he should sue.

Rob’s new offering, Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls, and the Longest Fucking Title Ever Given to an Album Not Recorded by Fiona Apple, comes out November 17.

-AR

Thanks to Jonathon Edwards for the tip!

Vince and I saw Ministry’s (alleged) farewell tour last night, which is to say, we went to see Meshuggah (who ruled – Vince’ll have a review up a little later I think), and then we decided to stick around for Ministry, who just happened to be the headliners.

There were two distinct crowds at this show, and after Meshuggah concluded their set, suddenly all the long haired dudes with big beards split and the venue was suddenly overflowing with what we might call, for lack of a better term, hipsters, yuppies, and good old fashioned bridge n’ tunnel trash. Ministry took an unbearably long amount of time to set up, mostly, I think, because they perform from behind a chain-link fence that had to be installed (Is Al Jourgensen saying we’re all prisoners of the band, or that the band are prisoners of us all? HE’S SO DEEP!!!). Then the lights dimmed and some intro music started and I thought “Oh, swell. The band is finally gonna come out and play some music now.”

Then the intro music kept going.

And going.

And going.

Seriously, this intro was so long that it’s still happening right now. I’m still standing here, typing this review as the intro music plays, waiting for the band to come out. “Wow,” a friend of ours jokes, “live they sound exactly the same as they do on the CD!” Yes, they’ve decided to go ahead and just play an entire song from the CD over the PA system for their “intro.” And it’s not a short song, either. Another friend wonders aloud why they’ve kept the crowd waiting for so long if they’re not even on stage for the first fifteen hours of their show.

Oh-kay! The band has finally gone on now. They open with “Let’s Go” from The Last Sucker, and suddenly I’m reminded why I never really like Ministry that much: for each song, they find a cool riff, and then just play it over and over and over and over again. Sometimes they find a second cool riff and then play that for too long as a kind of bridge between bouts of playing the original cool riff. Even stoned or drunk, this shit can get real old, real fast. Add to that the fact that Jourgensen, as a performer, strives to be very, um, theatrical, which I usually dig, but, really, he’s not that good at being theatrical. He just kind of comes off like the David Cross character on Arrested Development.

Above, I’ve posted Ministry’s video for “Just One Fix.” It’s a song I generally like, and when I was a young man, I found the video, with its weird William S. Burroughs cameo and kid endless puking, to be genuinely disturbing. It’s how I’d like to remember Ministry – not the way we (allegedly) said “farewell” to them last night.

-AR