Ministry

		MINISTRY THE FORUM LONDON, UK MAY 27, 2008 review by Alissa Ordabai photos by Christine Natanael
		LINKS: ministrymusic.org myspace.com/ministrymusic
If there is one band left these days that can still take its audience on a trip so singular that seeing them live becomes an almost mind-altering experience, it's Ministry--the pioneers of industrial who have transformed the face of alternative music in the early '90s and have now announced that their current tour is going to be the last one they ever play. Still not quite believing that this was really going to be the band’s last London show, the motley crowd of goths, metalheads, dance club hounds, musicians, artists and music writers gathered at London’s Forum on May 27 to witness the diabolical mayhem this act is capable of creating. And as if matching the surrealism of this band's universe, the outfits in the crowd were equally odd and eclectic. There were tall lean creatures on platforms wearing snow-white makeup and leather, there were working class kids in their overalls, bohemian young men wearing scarves and eyeliner, people who looked like tramps for a lack of a better word, and squeaky-clean junior office clerks. The venue was packed, and tension kept mounting while stage-hands were putting up a 2.5-meter tall metal meshed fence to separate the stage from the audience. Either to portray the band as trapped souls, or to emphasise the sense of alienation and isolation which is omnipresent in their music, or simply to shield the band from an invasion from the crowd, the trick worked to create obvious, tangible pressure.
The show began soon after the fence was set up, with lights going down and terse sounds of electronica samples hooked to a dance beat emerging from the speakers, while the screen above the stage showed an image of a rotating skull-shaped disco ball. Several minutes later the band came on stage one by one, and almost immediately launched into “Let’s Go”, the hot, powerful wave of their sound instantly connecting with the crowd and filling the room with an opulent, malevolently beautiful sonic presence with hypnotic beat presiding over a pulsating universe of samples, quirky guitars and Al Jourgensen's ominous, effect-laden voice. Meanwhile, the screen above the stage was churning out stuff just as intense—documentary black-and-white images of starvation in Africa, footages of demonstrations somewhere in the West being violently dispersed by the police, images of Bin Laden, chronicles of Nazi rallies and scenes of natural disasters running non-stop in a macabre pageant of modern history's social and economic disasters. On the one hand, this gave the music unmissable connotations Jourgensen and Co. have always been anxious to drive home, but on the other, it took the music outside of notions of time and made the show transgress into a dizzying world of repetitive harmonic cycles with vocals and lead guitar going gonzo above it all and awe-inspiring drums carrying on their own fierce operation underneath.
While images of evil kept appearing on the screen in a steady stream, the stage remained immersed in almost complete darkness, as if emphasising the fact that the origins of this music are dark, sinister places, with strobe lights flashing into the audience now and then in a deliberate attempt to blind the crowd, which responded immediately by plummeting into ruthless moshing that didn't stop until the end of the show. Lit by the dim stage lights, Al Jourgensen resembled an 18th century undertaker out of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s nightmare vision, wearing Ozzy-style shades and a cylinder, grabbing onto the mic stand with hands clad in racing gloves, half-leaning on this phantasmagoric construction that looked like a mutated cross growing out of an animal skull. His voice, put through several effects, sounded completely otherworldly, but at the same time real, palpable and in-your-face, conveying the grandeur of this band's vision with Olympian strength and a weird kind of ghoulish dignity.
	Standouts of the show were numerous, from the blistering groove of “Watch Yourself” with layers of texture and forever decaying guitar notes on top of it, to architectonic soundscape of “Khyber Pass”, where the primordial Eastern harmony sounded both earthy and stratospheric, Aaron Rossi dropping bass-drum bombs amidst this spaced-out pandemonium. Sin Quirin soloed on “Khyber Pass” with clarity and ease, in an almost telepathic interplay with the rest of the band, matching the ferociousness of Tommy Victor's leads when he intermeshed blistering runs with screaming notes held down ad infinitum. “No W” was the set’s most outspoken assault against Bush, and Jourgensen’s best vocal performance of the night, supported by a compulsive ostenato harmony spookily mirroring the obsessional neurosis of our so-called world leaders. Ministry’s aversion to Bush is well-documented, but unlike other musicians who are now willy-nilly driven to act politically, Ministry are among the rare ones who match the forcefulness of their views with ferocity of their music.

Strobe lights flashing non-stop, plus visual images of depravity, violence and environmental decay running ceaselessly on the screen, in the end turned the hyper-realism of the visual part of the show into deliberately calculated phantasmagoria, image and sound coming together to destroy categories of perception and generating sensations going into the realm of pure trance. It is true that Ministry’s is a tightly woven network of coordinates, but the end result they achieve is so powerful, unexpected and unique, that even the covers that the band played for the encore—The Doors’ "Roadhouse Blues" and Bob Thiele’s "Wonderful World"—sounded completely like them, without a hint of Jim Morrison or Louis Armstrong. This singularity of sound and uncompromising ruthlessness of vision have, since the early ‘90s, been subjects of numerous replication attempts from a plethora other acts, all of them failing to come close to the same richness and strength of vision as Jourgensen’s.
It is hard to say how Ministry have managed to remain so utterly inimitable over all those years. Their secret is probably in how they convey so much drama and spiritual power while at the same time repudiating any interest in sentiment. Or it could be in the way they put across the most brutal of metal’s messages while relying on what is fundamentally dance and pop beats. Or how they single-mindedly continue pushing into the darkest realms of human psyche beyond the point where most other bands stop. Creative methods and political grievances aside, what the night's show had demonstrated was that with Ministry art remains as inexplicable as life itself when its making is approached with honesty and courage. And that you certainly don't have to reach the end of your creative tether in order to dissolve a band. Because if this tour is indeed going to be the last one before Ministry’s exist from stage, they will again show that they are different from all other bands by breaking up in their prime—something that has never been done voluntarily in this business before.