The story is famous : in the early 80s' Chicago, Al Jourgesen founded Ministry and released With Sympathy, a new wave album far from its more chaotic ambitions. For decades, With Sympathy and its successor Twitch were disowned by their creator, Jourgensen even throwing nasty tantrums at the mere mention of them. Although Twitch already had EBM aspirations and was beginning to use film samples, all this must have sounded far too smooth and danceable for the man who, with The Land of Rape and Honey, gave life to industrial metal and its hallucinatory dreams of mechanical disorder.
And then, over time, we felt Jourgensen's attitude evolve. It's hard to know exactly when the truculent singer made peace with his past, but the signs had been there for a while. After ending Ministry twice, in 2008 and 2012 after a series of bland thrash metal albums, we sensed a new-found pleasure (and a return to electronic experiments) as early as Amerikkkant in 2017... but it was mainly in 2019, with an acoustic cover of Everyday is Halloween, that the hatchet seemed to be buried between Al and his earlier works. Since then, Ministry have covered Fad Gadget's Ricky's Hand and given concerts devoted to their first two albums. While Jourgensen has shed his dreads and piercings, he promised that he still had two albums to release, including a compilation of re-recorded tracks from With Sympathy and Twitch. So here's The Squirrely Years Revisited, a nostalgic but also ‘updated’ collection of songs.
Work for Love sets the tone from the outset: while it remains faithful to the original groove, Al's voice is closer to what we're used to. The sound is thicker, some guitars roar without taking over... but it's above all these samples, to which he seems to address a furious ‘fuck off!" that feel fresh. These old, once-hated tracks have become cult favourites over the years, some of them even essential hits, and these new versions preserve their charm while making them sound like ‘modern’ Ministry: it's fun, it's funny, it's funky. In short, it works. We're particularly taken with the new versions of the legendary Revenge and Effigy, which are given a new heaviness, a menace that takes nothing away from these timeless hits but strikes a curious balance between pop, hard FM and industrial metal. Decidedly, Ministry has rarely been so entertaining, so uninhibited... and so accessible to a wide audience.
The tracks on Twitch, an already stranger album, receive a particularly interesting treatment. Perhaps because Twitch, with its strong EBM roots, was closer to Jourgensen's vision. You can feel the shadows of Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and DAF in these dry rhythms and danceable hardness, and you also remember that Ministry, as well as synthpop, thrash metal and punk, flirted with gothic and post-punk (I'm Falling, I'll do Anything for You). To the minimalism of EBM, Ministry added its taste for stacked samples and brass instruments, while psychedelic overtones were grafted onto the austerity.
We're also treated to a new version of Same Old Madness, a track that was left aside at the time of With Sympathy only to re-emerge as a ‘rarity’ later on. With its updated lyrics, this track alone seems to sum up the approach of The Squirrely Years Revisited: what was relevant forty years ago is still relevant today, it just needs a slightly adapted forrm. Ministry didn't wait for the 2000s and its crusade against Bush, and then the election of Trump in 2016, to get political: Ronald Reagan was already its target back then. Over time, he's just grown wiser, which gives the unchanged lyrics of Just Like You and its aggressive Thieves-style intro a special flavour. While the track smacks of metal and sweaty muscles banging anvils, Jourgensen croons his cynical prophecies: ‘1980’s was run by a person who's crazy like you, The 1990‘s will be unkindly, exactly like you / When one dictator is the same as the leader just like you, we work, we survive’. It's all cyclical, the years go by, and perhaps it was just a matter of the singer getting older to realise that his earlier work lends itself strangely well to our times. Or for metalheads in general to finally embrace their love of drum machines and new wave.
The Squirrely Years Revisited is an interesting package in more ways than one. It offers a journey through Ministry's history, illustrating all its diversity. By building a bridge between past and present, the album mixes eras to great effect. While Ministry's aim has always been to deconstruct and even explode easy, smooth musical formulas, Jourgensen mixes pop and mechanical nightmares with, you guessed it, a wry smile. "Make Ministry Synth Again": the formula has been circulating in the EBM/industrial communities for a long time. We're not quite there yet, but it's when you feel Jourgensen is having fun that Ministry is at its best. And what if, in the end, in this improbable balance that could satisfy a variety of appetites, Ministry had released its best gateway to its discography, something both seductive and biting, nostalgic and current? It's ironic to find such a whiff of freshness in this look back over forty years.
