Ministry
The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste

THE REVIEW

The Ministry were the greatest at blending heavy metal and industrial, but they didn't stop there; they were also great experimenters, layering upon layering of experiments to build chilling atmospheres and detonate them in the most abhorrent way. Practically an enchantment.
The grand chamberlain is Allen Jourgensen, a brilliant maniac.
Their tracks are insult rallies of an era of totalitarianism through the most alien technology, and therefore uncontrollable by us poor future victims, an idea perhaps not very original, but it is saved by the centrifuge of their proposal. The elder cousins of Nine Inch Nails deliver this The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste as a worthy follow-up to a masterpiece (The Land Of Rape And Honey), and if anything, they become even crueller and bloodier.

It is truly a "pain of the mind," something that penetrates deeply into the individual (and perhaps social) consciousness, something that not only originates from the authoritarian abuses of parents and police but from the very way society is structured.
Speed-metal tracks with detonations of sparse and gigantic construction enterprises formed by remote-controlled cyborgs, the dark and tragic sound up to the paranoia of these 9 pieces, together compose a terrible sociopolitical fresco. In this triumph of negative sounds, martial riffs, lugubrious slow motions, speed-core, paranoia of the post-everything kid wallow.
Allen exploits hardcore bases to elaborate a suburban Chrome-mechanized thrash work, with instrumental escapes à la Metallica that emit radiations of total despair, of immeasurable agony, of the extinction of the mind, of the end of civilization.

This album should be remembered in the annals of rock as it builds an ideal bridge between the post-industrial music of Neurosis, the sub-gothic mood of Swans, and the criminal accelerations of Black Flag and paves the way for mister Reznor. Despite the chaos, the instrumental scores underlying this music are extremely sophisticated. Those who consider this music stuff for teenagers should immediately fuck off from my sight.
Best tracks: all of them.
Ingredients: 10% Metallica, 30% Swans, 20% Chrome, 5% Black Flag, 5% Clock Dva, 30% originality.
Where to listen: in the Tokyo metro pressed against the door: "hey, but don't you also smell gas?".