Three 65, Day 6
Ministry, Psalm 69

I was initially hesitant to pick up a Ministry album, mostly because I was warned by high school classmates not so. "Don't truck with Ministry, man!" they'd say. "You'll wind up doing heroin! That shit is made by the devil!" And this was coming from guys who liked Metallica and Slayer, so I figured this stuff was extreme, and at the time I stashed it away with the kind of brutal material now produced by bands like Burzum.

But my curiosity finally got the better of me, and so I picked up Psalm 69, Ministry's fifth album and the one that got them the most radio rotation and MTV airplay. I hadn't heard a single song before that, and as I walked home from the mall listening to the opening strains of the battering-ram-like "N.W.O.," I thought, "Holy shit! Someone has combined my two favorite things: heavy metal and disco."

That's an oversimplification, to be sure. Ministry's sound is a lot more than heavy metal and disco: it's got elements of post-industrial, punk, and techno to it as well. But that was my defining thought of the day, so we'll go with that. Psalm 69 is, if not the finest distillation of Ministry's trademark caustic noise, at least the most accessible point of entry.

Starting with the aforementioned "N.W.O.," a toxic screed against the first President Bush's imperialist policies in the Gulf War, Psalm 69 leaps out of the speakers in a visceral way that no album I had heard before ever did. Surrounded by klaxons, pounding drums, and demented guitar riffing, Al Jourgensen's distorted vocals issue lyrics about clowns and destruction, while Bush blabs on in the background, courtesy of the numerous samples peppered throughout the song. Then there's "Just One Fix," which features another sample, this one of Courtney Love croaking from the film Sid & Nancy: "Never trust a junkie." (She's never sounded better, by the way.) "TV II" and "Hero" carry the metal theme forward, while "Scarecrow" is a terrifying slow and brutal uptake on the chord progression from Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks."

But no analysis of Psalm 69 would be complete without mention of the album's centerpiece, "Jesus Built My Hotrod" - the Ministry money shot. Over a blazingly fast guitar lead and washed out drums, Butthole Surfers vocalist Gibby Haynes (the liner notes read that he appears "courtesy of his own bad self") scats and gibbers maniacally about trailers and country livin'. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't have to; the song hits like a punch to the solar plexus, all power and force and fury.

This would, I'm afraid, be Ministry's last contribution to the pantheon of major works by industrial artists. They would go on to abandon their sound in favor of a slower, doomier approach (at least until co-conspirator Paul Barker left, at which point Jourgensen became obsessed with George W. Bush and recorded a trilogy of tasteless speed metal albums about him), leaving most of the samples behind and focusing on musicianship instead - of which Ministry had little, if any.