Ministry is, for all intents and purposes (intense and porpoises), Alain (sometimes “Alien”) Jourgenson, born in Cuba and raised all over the US. There have been a number of different incarnations and a number of different collaborators, but he is the eye of this sonic hurricane.
They released their first single on Wax Trax!, the influential industrial/dance label based in Chicago (and releasers of John Waters’ diva Divine’s version of The Name Game (you know, Anna Anna Bo Banna Banana Fanna Fo Fanna Fee Fie Mo Manna….)). This landed them a record deal with Arista, and their first album With Sympathy. At this point, Ministry was indistinguishable from the hoards of new wave synth pop bands that were flooding the market and trying to be the next Human League or Thompson Twins. Disgusted and disillusioned with the sound of the album, Jourgenson disbanded the group and tried to find a little edgier sound.
Super producer Adrian Sherwood (Tackhead, etc) came on board to help him craft Twitch, from which this was pulled. As far as Ministry is concerned, Twitch is a halfway effort, somewhere between the cheesy synth pop of their first album and the terrifying roar of angry guitars that marked their influential third album, The Land of Rape and Honey, a sound they soon settled on and which, to this day, defines the band. Although disappointed with this album as well (although not as much as with the first one, which Jourgenson refers to today as “an abortion”), it represents for me the perfect balance between the two extremes. I love synth pop, as should be abundantly clear by now, but I also appreciate the exhilarating, crushing wall of sound that punk and heavy metal offer. The problem is, I don’t really like guitars that much. So this is the best of both worlds for me.
I also heard it at exactly the right time. Frustrated, angry, and confused, I was burning out during my second year at Hampshire College. I had once again begun asking the questions that are the kiss of death in college (why am I here and why do I have to learn these things?). Classes were getting harder and harder to attend, the readings seemed more and more pointless, and I just didn’t know what to do about it. Needing sustenance, I stumbled across Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which helped me put my troubles in perspective and saved my college career. Needing a release, I stumbled across Ministry and Foetus, and reveled in their bleak, overpowering walls of noise. Had I tried to listen to it a few months earlier or a few months later, I would’ve turned it off and never gone back to it. But it was just the piece of jagged glass I needed to chew on at the time, and it helped me summon up the energy I’d need to get through the rest of the semester.
Jourgenson had a couple of interesting side projects, including the notorious Revolting Cocks, and a one single release as PTP – which is not the track in the club scene in Robocop, which, like a surprising amount of cool film music, was never released on the official soundtrack. But Ministry is what he’s known and loved for. The walls of angry guitars that characterize Ministry’s later and more representative sound never did much for me, but much of Twitch is sublime. Although Jourgenson would rather disown that album from his catalog, the truth of the matter is that it helped pave the way for the bracing blend of industrial dance music and heavy metal that Nine Inch Nails was able to capitalize on a few years later with their (almost) ground-breaking first album, Pretty Hate Machine (also co-produced by Adrian Sherwood), which then created more interest in the Ministry sound. Twitch (great title) ends with just about the most intense distillation of industrial dance noise ever released, the punishing Crash and Burn. Clocking in at over 12 minutes, Crash and Burn starts off quietly enough, but then blows up into a horrific symphony of smashing metal and screeching steel. About ten minutes in, the track, unable to support itself, starts to come unglued and then it totally falls apart at the end, but it’s an thrilling, frightening ride while it lasts.
“Frighten me? No, Frank, I think startled is a better word”.
