This is sadly belated; I meant to post it before (or on!) Halloween, but I was busy, plus I got a terrible cold over Halloween weekend and was laying around in bed half the day miserably. Ministry is best known as an industrial metal band, but they went through two earlier incarnations before that. 1986's Twitch was a hard EMB sound, not too unlike some Front 242, Nitzer Ebb or even Frontline Assembly of similar vintage, and before that, Ministry released the rather tepid synthpop album With Sympathy in 1983. It's not clear whether Arista pressured Ministry's Al Jourgensen to release a synthpop album because that's what they wanted in their stable at the time (for 1983, that doesn't seem unlikely) or if Al himself was doing that because he hadn't discovered the concept of "harder" music yet on his own. In any case, he certainly disavowed the album in later years.
Near the end of his synthpop era, in 1984, Ministry released the non-album single "Everyday is Halloween" which seems to be a song about being goth. It got a pretty cool (although also pretty faithful, really) cover version by Dangerous Muse more recently, and it's been covered by a variety of goth musicians in a number of styles since. After this release, Ministry left Arista and signed up with Wax Trax!, the famous industrial label, and put out some pretty dark and hard-edged EBM, before becoming even harder and more metal. This is by far the best of their synthpop output, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment