Ministry
Rio Grande Blood

THE REVIEW

So, let's say that “Psalm 69:The Way To Succeed And The Way To Suck Eggs” from 1992 was the ultimate farewell of Ministry, unfortunately, the farewell extended until 2006 with this “Rio Grande Blood,” and who knows how much longer it will go on.

The only skill that seems to be left for Al Jourgensen and company is to grind riffs, feedback, and Slayer-like guitar licks into an inconsistent ensemble sprinkled here and there with those samples and industrial sounds that had once made them one of the greatest bands to emerge from the fertile ground of the USA underground.

Not that anyone expected a new “The Land Of Rape And Honey” or any further evolution from a group that has already given everything to music, but the metal and hardcore turn evidenced by this album and already initially sketched in the previous “Houses Of The Molé” (which now, in some ways, seems much more enjoyable, perhaps because in hindsight, we realized that the worst was yet to come with the next album) demonstrates how Ministry have lost faith in their extraordinary sound and original subversive charge, preferring to hitch onto the bandwagon of metal winners and anyone who exploits populist anti-Bush rhetoric to pursue that single leitmotif that the entertainment industry and all the entourage around it have now elevated to a lifestyle: money.

Oh yes, money...

It could not be otherwise, considering the title track of this album which, besides tumbling through a typical obsolete series of beats, various percussions, voices, and guitars that wink at the worst, as well as the most predictable, thrash and speed metal, is filled with middle school proclamations like “I want your money” or “I’m a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons” aimed at their most illustrious fellow countryman: George “bla bla bla” Bush. Ministry seems to rely on that fake-rebel formula built on the generic chatter of posers that has made great bands full of inanities like System Of A Down: those flashes of light, those brilliant strokes of genius to which their pre-thrash metal era albums had us accustomed now no longer exist. Forgotten.

Now there are only the Slayer-style riffs in “Senor Peligro” and the distorted vocalizations that scream “coram populi” lyrics in the best Ministry tradition. The problem is that Allen “Mr. Alien” Jourgensen in recent albums seems to be increasingly focused on fighting his personal crusade against the world rather than paying attention to what he plays: come on, the reference points of “Rio Grande Blood” are the same albums you can find in the CD player of your thirteen-year-old brother angry in his Slipknot t-shirt et cetera (“Lieslieslies,” “Fear (Is Big Business)”). Really a low blow. Like the vertiginous drop of “Palestina” the umpteenth track that apes nu-metal.
We're at the paradox: Ministry, among the first to mix heavy metal and punk electronics, are copying the stuff played by the many degenerate offspring of their own music! Even the guests, above all Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys on “Ass Clown,” neither add nor detract anything from the overall value of the album, their performances are completely anonymous and bland. Among the most beautiful gems of the album are the "symphonic" “Khyber Pass” and “Yellow Cake,” with the brilliant use of guitars and sounds with electro reminiscences that interpenetrate to create delirious, epileptic, luciferian techno music.

Two tracks that give us a free regret, making us reflect on what this album could have been with a pinch more inventiveness (which these Texans by adoption certainly do not lack) and a touch less tedious banality.