With greater venom than Tom Hardy wrapped in symbiotic gunk, Al Jourgensen has spent an entire career slagging off his early music. He still refuses to even utter the title of Ministry’s 1983 debut album, With Sympathy, let alone listen to what he calls a “sonic abortion” which he believes to be full of “fucking drivel”. He can never allow himself to enjoy its Heaven 17-esque bops because, for Jourgensen, that record is associated too closely with memories he has literally described as traumatic. While other voices have suggested With Sympathy’s creation wasn’t quite so dramatically harrowing, Jourgensen’s version goes something like this.
After forming in 1981 and releasing the post punky ‘I’m Falling’ / ‘Cold Life’ single on Chicago’s Wax Trax! Records, Ministry were offered a juicy contract by Arista. Jourgensen was in his early 20s and living in squalor. He was promised a career in music with a lifestyle as glamorous as that of Wham! or Thompson Twins. He was up for it at first. When making With Sympathy, it dawned on him how creatively unfulfilling it was to have a label dictate one’s haircuts, outfits, sound, producers, studio, backing musicians, videos, management, artwork and even (apparently) lyrics. He’s since compared the experience to being drafted into the army or working on a plantation. This is a dude in showbiz we’re talking about so that’s a little over the top. The point is it took its mental toll.
“I was literally a product of the old-school star-making machine,” Jourgensen told tQ in 2016. “Actually I think without that record I wouldn’t be as much of a fucking maniac douchebag as I am today. I completely rebelled against it… I fucking hated myself, the world, and everything around me because of that record.”
During Ministry’s later career, if anyone dared ask Jourgensen to sign a copy of With Sympathy he would agree only when presented with a cheque for a few hundred dollars made out to an approved charity. And, blimey, what a career it was. Anglophilic synth pop’s loss was industrial metal’s gain. For about a decade or so from the late 1980s, this maniac douchebag was touched with a production prowess and future-forging vision that couldn’t be weakened by the simultaneous intake of every mind-altering and addictive substance under the sun. Not for a while, at least.
To get everything done, Jourgensen decided he would need to give up either alcohol or sleep and relinquished the latter. Added to the diet of acid-infused Bushmills was cocaine, heroin, speedballs, pills, powders and whatever else he got his tattooed hands on. Over the years he would lose a toe, his teeth and nearly an arm. He had to be resuscitated from death (thrice) and survived kidney failure, liver failure and three forms of hepatitis. His work ethic was as herculean as his drug consumption, however. He built an impressive and influential body of work, especially in his mercurial period, while also producing other artists and participating in several side-projects (most notably Revolting Cocks).
Jourgensen had fled Arista with the realisation that artistic compromise begat frivolous short-term gains accompanied by bucketloads of regret, humiliation and self-disgust. Produced by Adrian Sherwood, 1986’s Twitch was the stepping stone to the harder-edged style that became Ministry’s calling card. This came into full fruition on 1988’s The Land Of Rape And Honey and its successors, The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste (1989) and Psalm 69: The Way To Succeed And The Way To Suck Eggs (1992). The ingredients to Ministry’s melting pot of malevolent noise included elements of dub, disco, Belgian hardbeat, hardcore punk, post punk and thrash metal, often peppered with imaginative use of samples with a debt to hip hop production teams. After years of eschewing guitars in favour of fiddling with keyboards, Jourgensen found he had a knack for conceiving heavy metal riffs that were simple yet potent. “All feel, no technique,” as he called them.
In Jourgensen’s view, his principle talent lay in the slicing and splicing of different elements to create overwhelming collages of sound. This compositional breakthrough occurred during The Land Of Rape And Honey and was partly inspired by the cut-up technique that Brion Gysin had introduced to William S. Burroughs. Before the ready availability of digital editing technology, this method of music-making was a painstaking as well as literally painful process, in the course of which Jourgensen had to draw marks on physical reel-to-reel tapes, divide the tape into sections of equal sizes and reassemble them by hand. These mammoth editing sessions could last up to 14 hours and by the end of each one Jourgensen’s hands would be riddled with accidental razor cuts. He suffered for his art, man.
Ministry’s impact stretches far and wide. It can be succinctly summarised by quoting Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails leader and respected co-composer of the soundtrack to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. “My dream was to be like Al,” he said in the Ministry documentary Fix. “He was the most creative guy out there at the time. And it seemed like he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about it.”
It is difficult enough to break new ground in the first place. To expect artists to do it over and over again is an order taller than the bassist from Nirvana. As Jourgensen curbed his drug intake, while still drinking himself towards an ulcer which would rupture in 2010, this Cuban-born immigrant became more obsessed with the politics of his adopted homeland. This was channelled into a trilogy of records directed against the administration of George W. Bush. To paraphrase Lou Reed, one album about an imbecilic president is fine. Two albums is pushing it. Three and you’re turning into Anti-Flag.
Naturally, Jourgensen hates the McDonald’s-clogged guts of Orange Donald even more, not to mention his backers, and this rage has informed Ministry’s recent output. While these recordings have had their moments, only the most deluded disciple would claim they contain tons of surprises. On the whole, listeners know what to expect. Riffs. Synthesisers. Samples. Impotent yelling about the conman in The White House, the baseball-capped turkeys who’ve voted for Thanksgiving and the chuckling American oligarchy with the crypto symbols in their eyes. A harmonica will turn up on one song; Jello Biafra on another. No longer a case of “alcohol or sleep”, Jourgensen could write this stuff in a catnap.
To be fair to Jourgensen, the wider industrial metal scene hasn’t produced anything particularly stimulating recently either (underground noiseniks such as Lana Del Rabies excepted). Like modern action films’ reliance on CGI as a convenient replacement for the physical sets and actual explosions of the first Terminator and RoboCop movies, digital innovation has made industrial music easier and quicker to create yet it seems to have lost something since its earlier analogue days; a human and earthy element, with the mistakes and the cracks still present.
That’s some of the context out of the way, then. 11 paragraphs before getting to the album under review might be a new personal record. What’s the prize? A week-long writing retreat with Geoff Dyer? Better pack a tennis racquet. Here’s the delayed headline, anyway: The Squirrely Years Revisited is the most compelling record Ministry have put out in absolute yonks. Part of this is because it’s so damn unexpected. It’s not an entire new version of With Sympathy, although that idea must’ve been discussed at some point. It contains re-recordings of a handful of songs from that renounced album, along with other numbers from Ministry’s early days.
This startling project occurred for two reasons. First, Jourgensen went to see the early Ministry covers band who call themselves, appropriately, With Sympathy. He was dragged along, while “wasted”, and could not believe people even knew songs like ‘Work For Love’ and wanted to hear them performed in concert. Later, when Ministry’s lineup revealed a revamped version of ‘Revenge’ they’d secretly been working on for months, Jourgensen was astonished by its quality. It may have helped that he was high on mushrooms at the time of exposure. That’s beside the point. He was done with disowning the past. The time had come to own it instead. At 66 years old, Jourgensen is finally mellowing. Don’t get me wrong, he still despises With Sympathy. But he felt he didn’t need to continue to be so angry about it until the day he dies. “OUR WORK HERE IS DONE!”, that covers band noted on their Facebook page.
Aside from The Squirrely Years even existing in the first place, another of its surprising aspects is that these new versions are so faithful to the blueprints. They have not been fed through the blender of Psalm 69 and blasted back into the world as blisteringly busy Burroughsian metal. Thankfully, nor do they sound as cackhanded as all those 80s cover songs by nu metal bands and Marilyn Manson that dominated rock club nights in the early 2000s (and still do, I’m told), like a sewage flood welcomed into an uninsured kitchen. Early Ministry’s poppiness, once part of Jourgensen’s shame regarding these pieces, has been retained unashamedly. They are heavier, yes, but in a fairly subtle fashion which in some cases will have you reaching for the originals to pinpoint the differences. Ministry have aimed for an “arena rock” vibe and something truer to Jourgensen’s vision prior to Arista’s alleged meddling.
Thus, ‘Work For Love’ and ‘Here We Go’ are still delightfully funky and soulful. The songs have added riffs, guitar solos and other sonic layers. There are different pitches, keys, tempos, and lengths to the initial tracks. Everything is denser and a little bit darker. The synths are still granted proud prominence, and they sound fantastically retro and modern at the same time. Thus, ‘All Day’ (originally released when Ministry returned to Wax Trax! after the Arista debacle) is now less like early Depeche Mode and more like… later Depeche Mode, i.e. the creepier and superior version. For better or worse, ‘I’m Falling’ is no longer so skeletal. ‘I’m Not An Effigy’ has a gothy chug to it, reminiscent of when Gary Numan began borrowing from some of the grittier artists he’d influenced in the first place.
Given their nature, the Twitch songs (which are CD-only, incidentally) were in less need of an update, so ‘Just Like You’ and ‘We Believe’ feel a touch redundant. They’re fatter now, like everything else. Has some of their grimy charm been lost in the process?
Okay, maybe ‘Everyday Is Halloween’ does have something of Marilyn Manson about it. That’s mainly due to the subject matter and the fact that Ministry were one of the two bands who Brian Warner and his musical enablers were plagiarising so brazenly and badly. “I live with snakes and lizards / And other things that go bump in the night,” growls Jourgensen on this reimagination of Wizzard’s Christmas hit for people who prefer to carve pumpkins than turkey. The fact that Jourgensen hasn’t changed many of these songs’ lyrics earns respect in itself, given there will be those that make his maturer self cringe. First laid down when Jourgensen was in thrall to English new wave, the notorious “a room with me mum and me dad” line in ‘I’m Not An Effigy’ now goes “my mom and my dad”.
‘Same Old Madness’ has been updated from the “nuclear age” to the “digital” one with references to disinformation, corporate exploitation and humanity’s time running out. It hardly needed this, even if it does help to replicate the original’s urgency without using outdated references to Ronald Reagan and Soviet Russia.
Among the rest of the untouched lyrics, ‘I’ll Do Anything For You’ stands up as an earnestly obsessive love song while the gloomier ruminations elsewhere range from the adolescent to the miserably profound.
Jourgensen proves an adept ventriloquist, too. ‘Over The Shoulder’ works better than the other Twitch numbers probably because it’s such a weird – and weirdly sung – piece in the first place. Jourgensen still sings it in a high-pitched, androgynous and unhinged fashion, with perhaps an additional what-the-fuck Ween-ness to the already bizarre experience. Across the whole record he seems to relish the opportunity to show off his range by crooning, croaking, whispering, raging, heightening and lowering his voice, as required. Anticipating a parched grunt in lieu of the healthier vocal cords Jourgensen possessed in his 20s? Prepare to have your expectations confounded.
Jourgensen has spoken of this being a “full circle” moment, although he hasn’t used that cliché as often as the journalists writing about him, who should know better. I’m no theoretical physicist but as far as I can perceive it, time is linear. Preferable is the way Jourgensen has described this phase as “wrapping a bow” around Ministry’s long career. Before what? Kicking the parcel into the sea? Donating it to the Library Of Congress? Leaving it under a Tesla before triggering its detonator from a distance?
Jourgensen says there will be one more Ministry album after this one. He’s ended the band a few times before, so this should be taken with a pinch of salt. Those splits tended to occur in more chaotic circumstances, however, and he does seem determined to wind it down in order to pursue other projects.
Like a grizzled cop or a gangster sunburning in the Costa Del Crime, you think you’re out of the industrial metal business and then something lures you back in again. Will Jourgensen resist the temptation to keep Ministry’s show on the road? They’ll be more call for it if their “final” album is as entertaining as this penultimate gambit.
There’s a chance Jourgensen doesn’t even want The Squirrely Years to be as successful as it deserves to be. That’s one plausible explanation for why the chuffing hell he’s chosen such an unaesthetic album cover.
Or perhaps, whatever happens, he is still compelled to give the last laugh to his guiding inner douchebag.
The Squirrely Years Revisited is released on Friday via Cleopatra
