Must be a year starting with "20" because Ministry have rerecorded an old song again:
The single artwork is slightly less embarrassing than the album cover, I'll give them that.
I must ask, in good faith and as a lifelong obsessive fan of Ministry, Revolting Cocks and most of Al Jourgensen's and Paul Parker's side projects: what is the point in Ministry these days?
You could compare Ministry to The Simpsons: two iconic American cultural exports that began life in the 80s, nurtured by gentle British hands (Adrian Sherwood's and Tracey Ullman's, respectively). They both hit their creative peak in the 90s, both lost the plot by the turn of the decade/century/millennium and both continued to churn out lifeless junk for another 25 years. Or you might even compare them to the Labour Party: completely bereft of ideas but still enjoying the support of people who've got nowhere else to turn. In the absence of any other viable options, one might as well say fuck it and tune into whatever Al's up to these days.
So what is our favourite Cuban-American eccentric up to? Well, as you can probably guess from the clip above, he's decided it's time to revisit Ministry's early synthpop days, starting with a song which I can safely say I don't mind never hearing again in any form for as long as I live.
"Halloween", a once-charming, tongue-in-cheek little tune affectionately riffing on life as a teenage goth, has become an overused joke; the soundtrack to a million naff Instagoth memes, the alternative subculture's answer to Toto's "Africa" or that fucking Smashmouth song beloved of so many voluntarily housebound, excessively online millennials. It's the "Die Hard is my favourite Christmas movie" of Ministry songs.
The nicest thing I can say about this wholly unnecessary rework is that it is nowhere near as bad as the version extruded in 2010 by "Ministry 2.0" (or 3.0, if we're being strictly fair and counting Paul Barker's tenure as separate from the latter half of the metal years). It's just a bit naff, as opposed to needlessly, offensively, glue-your-own-ears-shut awful.
If you're going to listen to any 2010 version of Every Day Is Halloween, this twee indie cover sounds like it was always meant to be.
It was announced a few months ago that Paul Barker has returned to the fold to work on a new Ministry studio album, which hopefully won't just be more pointless rehashing of old material from before Barker even joined Ministry in the first place. n0teeth awaits the new material with a mixture of hype and wariness; while we wait for the long-overdue reunion of one of the greatest musical partnerships of the late 20th century to bear fruit, there's another band frying synapses and popping eardrums in the world of guitar-based industrial:
Mrs Internet hates industrial metal; her displeasure at me blasting this tune confirms that Purest Form are legit.
LA's Purest Form is the most thrilling musical discovery of my year so far. I'm not quite ready to stake my reputation on it but I think we've almost finally got a correctly functioning guitar thrasher industrial band for the 2020s.
Vocals made of pure rabid spite fight it out with rasping crossover thrash guitars and walloping programmed beats. Which, when you see it written down, could probably conjure up a few things you're certain you've heard before - but not like this you ain't, trust me. Purest Form does what it says on the tin: raging industrial thrash distilled to its essence.
The pace doesn't let up for a moment. This isn't the sludgy industrial doom of the thousand-odd Godflesh imitators out there at the minute, this is the full-throttle ribcage-rattling psycho-industrial amphetapunk Ministry invented with tunes like The Missing and Thieves and then just...sort of forgot about.
I can neither qualify nor quantify exactly what it is that elevates Purest Form over the countless mediocre industrial metal bands I've heard before. Maybe it's the apparent sincerity behind their rage - the impression that they haven't just got mad at The System after reading 1984 at Fear Factory's urging.
Or perhaps it's simply the sharpness of their sound: that abrasive, compacted broken glass crunch that first drew me towards American coldwave bands like Chemlab or 16Volt. For too long industrial metal has been synonymous with murky low-end sludge. While there's nothing wrong with that - and, hell, n0teeth will happily cop to enjoying a bit of that gear now and then - it's time to let some harsh white light cut through the cracks in the concrete.
Although elements of their look and sound suggest a background in hardcore punk and, as previously mentioned, crossover thrash, I don't think Purest Form are total ingenues naively approaching this subgenre from out of nowhere - there's a sly reference to early (but not quite "squirrely") Ministry in Broke: "Then it's over the shoulder". And a 10/10, perfect, spot-on, niche old school UK grebo-industrial reference in the cover art for their split with Fatal Realm:
My entire brain lit up at once.
No band has dragged raw riffage through a tunnel of corroded electronics and come out smelling this fresh since Panic Drives Human Herds - and no American artist has done it since Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar. But having a killer guitar sound is no good unless your electronics are also on point.
Happily, this isn't an issue for Purest Form: the whip-crack beats underpin the riffs with power and precision. And the vocals are harsh but somehow not in an irritating aggrotech kind of way. This band has "dynamics" - I can't really explain what dynamics is, I just know that a lot of other industrial bands don't have it.
Their cover of Breathe (psyche! you thought it would be Ministry's song by the same title!) comes off like a seethingly angry karaoke performance, but what more does it need to be? (If it ain't broke...) Then there's a remix by rising Italo body music stars Nuovo Testamento: an absurd proposal on paper but it works a charm. Pumping, tom-tom heavy house and industrial angst is, after all, a combination that any Wax Trax! fan can get behind.
Fellow Angelenos Inva//id are definitely onto something with their grinding, mechanistic take on Skuppy-esque electro-industrial. Could Purest Form be the guitar-heavy alternative we've been waiting for? No pressure, PF, but there's a Ministry-shaped void waiting to be filled here.
Other bands successfully bringing guitars back to industrial...
(...without diluting the subgenre into dishwater alt-rock):
Null Split
Long time n0teeth favourites. An
alarmingly young French group whose subsonic rounds deftly
ricochet between EBM and industrial metal.
8 Hour Animal
This solo artist's drum programming
is utterly merciless (as you'd expect from someone who cites
:wumpscut: as an influence) and the overall sound is so
extreme it borders on power electronics (as you'd expect from
someone who cites Controlled Bleeding as an influence).
Cyberplasm
Wait, no, yeah, hang on, we wrote something good for these lot
a while back:
"a sentient, evil drum machine with a punk band strapped onto it...short, fast & unbelievably vicious salvos of noise...Motorhead on research chemicals"
Support the artists by buying their wares on Bandcamp if you can. Read n0teeth's previous ramblings about industrial metal here.