Rating: 3
When I pulled this out of my wife's old tape box and asked her, "What is Ministry like?", she said, "I think you'll find it goes against everything you believe in."If she was referring to the lyrics, she may be right; I can't judge, as I was unable to make any of them out. (I did hear some anti-clerical statements. While I believe an honest debate about the role of the church in society is healthy and important, I'm not sure that "fuck the church" is a meaningful contribution to the discussion.)
If she was referring to the music, she was mostly on target, but I found a few things to admire. This band is very talented, particularly William Rieflin, who plays the hell out of the drums. It's hard to believe this was recorded live, as the group is incredibly tight, hitting very fast riffs without any sloppiness. And a lot of these riffs are pretty catchy, if only they connected to some other riffs or some nice melodies.
Unfortunately, their talent is wasted on mind-numbingly repetitive, melody-less grinding industrial rock. Allegedly these compositions have lyrics, but the vocals are sung by a guy who sounds like Tom Waits with laryngitis. Occasionally a song will have something resembling a chorus, but mostly it's the same four notes over and over for 6, 9, or 11 minutes. Throw in some feedback at the end and you've got an ear-destroying, soul-crushing 40 minutes of music. And I'm not the only one who couldn't bear it. The crowd sounds considerably smaller at the end of the show than it does at the beginning.