Photo Credit: Alexander Stafford
In the era of big ticket reunion tours, hardly any band seems to stay broken up for very long. But while long-running industrial icons Ministry have been resurrected once before, when mercurial mastermind Al Jourgensen called it quits in 2008 to focus on his ever-multiplying side projects before reuniting the group for From Beer to Eternity five years later, the sudden death of longtime guitarist Mike Scaccia turned that ostensible comeback into a conclusive swansong. Jourgensen remains adamant that Ministry will never release anything ever again (not that he’ll have any trouble staying busy), but fans were nevertheless delighted when he ultimately decided to hit the road in support of the final album, although if Saturday’s appearance at the Rave was supposed to serve as a farewell, it was an appropriately unsentimental one.
After an uninteresting opening set from Las Vegas thrash outfit Hemlock, who also warmed up for Ministry’s last “last” tour, the band emerged and regally played Jourgensen on with “Hail to His Majesty (Peasants),” From Beer to Eternity’s self-aggrandizing lead-off track. The rest of the record followed more or less in sequence, accompanied by a seizure-inducing barrage of lights and found footage, hyperactively cut to thematically fit each song. The visual display, genuinely psychedelic, grimly humorous and sometimes just plain silly, reached peak absurdity on the albums overtly political entries, like the apocalyptic global warming prediction “Perfect Storm” or “Fairly Unbalanced,” which, you guessed it, takes aim at Fox News. While those proved a little too on the nose lyrically, the less message-heavy songs came off far better, and burst out at ribcage-rattling volume.
Toward the end of the more than 90-minute show, they made time for a few oldies, including Psalm 69’s “N.W.O” and “Just One Fix” as well as “So What” from 1989’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, predictably sticking to material from the harshly metallic end of their discography and forgetting their far more dancefloor-friendly past life in the early-to-mid 1980s. There’s really no summing up the band’s unique weirdly eclectic career in one concert, not that Jourgensen would have any interest in doing so anyway, but if a future without Ministry records also means a world without Ministry tours, or at least for a good long while, none of the diehard, T-shirt sporting fans packed into the Rave seemed at all disappointed with this gleefully bombastic performance being their send-off.
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