Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 11:00am by Axl Rosenberg
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:
Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 11:30am by Axl Rosenberg
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.
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.
