Who could have predicted 20 or 30 years ago that not only would Ministry still be around, but that its deranged mastermind, Al Jourgensen, would be in far better form on stage than he was in the 2000s? Let’s go back almost two decades: Ministry, in the midst of a crusade against George W. Bush, announced that The Last Sucker would be their final album. Finito. Jourgensen could have walked hand in hand with the US president, whose two terms in office were also drawing to a close, and the two could have enjoyed a lovely retirement together.
However, since then, Ministry have released five original studio albums, covers, re-recordings of old tracks, live albums, remixes… and announced yet again that this time it was over, finished, finito, around 2013. However, something tells us that this time, with Hate to Go – Take Out or Delivery, Al isn’t messing about; he’s really had enough. Despite the pun in the title, Jourgensen has made no secret of his frustrations, his desire for something different, and the feeling of being somewhat stuck musically between the public’s expectations and his own desires (remember the side project Surgical Meth Machine). Having been going round in circles since the creative surge that was Amerikkkant in 2017, Jourgensen has even made peace with his long-despised past, revisiting the synthpop beginnings of his turbulent career. Come full circle, in short.
But then, what can we expect from yet another album – the seventeenth in 45 years? Well, a bit of everything and nothing special at the same time. Since the late 1990s, the career of this mad scientist of industrial metal has been uneven to say the least, with a few very good moments (notably on Rio Grande Blood and Amerikkkant) sitting alongside the worst (Relapse, From Beer to Eternity). The advance singles from Hate to Go didn’t exactly inspire blind optimism: at best, Ministry would carry on in the same vein as the last ten years – nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing particularly exciting or new to listen to...
Yet right from the off, there’s something about Crickets that grabs you by the throat straight away – a vicious track driven by a snarling Jourgensen and some seriously nasty riffs. In fact, the farewell gets off to a cracking start: it’s a proper brawl, and the thrash/punk/industrial mix doesn’t hold back, either musically (just listen to those drums that sound as if someone’s banging on bits of metal, or those guitars that reek of petrol and rust – here is some dirty, biting industrial metal just the way we like it!) or in its message, which is, of course, always politically charged and absolutely unapologetic. We often read, incidentally, that this trend in Ministry dates back to the Bush years… not at all! Take Just Like You, for instance, which, back in 1986, didn’t go easy on Reagan – long before guitars took centre stage in the band’s music!
Beyond the aggression of the album’s opening tracks, it’s great fun. As usual, the tirelessly repeated loops are layered with a kaleidoscope of samples, a blend of sounds and voices, but also a few delightful twists (the backing vocals on Clown Car set against apocalyptic riffs are brilliant). There’s that unmistakable touch of madness, that moment which takes off on an unpredictable trip and regularly captures our attention (the groove of The White Man Lied, the psychedelia of Burned Out where the artist’s frustration with the state of the world echoes his desire to withdraw from music), or even a few rare moments of sudden melancholy that descends, completely out of the blue (or right into the blue! - Drifter, for example). Generally speaking, we still love hearing Jourgensen’s rage take the upper hand over the apocalyptic chaos of the machines, but also how his industrial metal avoids the pitfalls of neat, mechanical and predictable tame electro-metal.
Alas, this is also where Hate to Go starts to lose us, with the stuffy We Hate (and, indeed, those somewhat over-the-top ‘Teutonic-style’ martial riffs) which struggles to get off the ground, followed by Delete, whose utterly unstructured nature we might otherwise have appreciated but which here seems a bit gratuitous… Jourgensen has never, in fact, been more deserving of his nickname ‘Uncle Al’: he’s more than ever that eccentric old uncle who’s always been there and for whom we have all the love in the world, but who can also be very embarrassing. Like when, in true boomer fashion, he rails against the excesses of the internet (social media in Delete, AI in Singularity), whilst making use of it in a rather dubious manner in his music videos or ‘just for a laugh’ online. This raises questions to which the pretence of irony and the parody of the orange nutter in the White House are not sufficient answers.
One might naively have believed that Jourgensen’s recent reconciliation with his early work would have led him to incorporate a few more new wave elements, for example (the opening of Burned Out could easily have veered into post-punk), given that he said this album would be a sort of synthesis of everything Ministry has been. We recall, then, when he explained that he felt trapped by the constraints his band faces… The much-heralded return of Paul Barker, the legendary bassist who contributed so much to the band’s sound between 1986 and 2003, ultimately features on just two tracks: Burned Out and We’re Still Here. And so it is with the latter – a twilight, melancholic conclusion with theatrical backing vocals and imbued with a rare emotional depth for Ministry, undoubtedly one of the album’s highlights – that this colourful studio adventure draws to a close.
Is it possible to discover Hate to Go without having formed an opinion about it before listening? Admittedly, the grimy experiments of over three decades ago have given way to an escalation in collage and jarring breaks that sometimes seem mechanical, but the spark of madness is still there. At times delightfully wicked, Hate to Go – Take Out or Delivery also gets a bit bogged down in a routine that’s, all things considered, rather predictable. It wasn’t before retiring that Jourgensen was going to open new doors and embark on new adventures. Jokingly (perhaps?), he now explains that he wants to raise goats. We’ll give him six months before he starts sampling their bleats to see if there isn’t something to be made of it! In the meantime, one might feel that Hate to Go, which doesn’t shake things up at Ministry, does the job without any greater ambition than to offer us one last flourish – an album made because it was time to say goodbye rather than because there were still things left to say. It’s nice, but there are moments when it feels a bit forced… And it’s no disrespect to Al to suggest that he shares this feeling! As that brilliant madcap says: make way for the youngsters, now!
