The mighty oink

Yeah, it's a paranoid nightmare, but so is Filth Pig (Sire/Warner Bros.), the new Ministry album. It seems carved from creativity and crack smoke -- as squirrelly as a scratching addict, as wily as downtown New York sound scrambler Nicholas Collins's noisescapes, as grating and delirious as something John Zorn would pull out of his bag o' trix. But it rocks. Big Time. As in the same monolith of dark-chocolate-colored guitar crunch and canyon-deep kick drum that made Ministry's last album, 1992's platinum-selling Psalm 69, such a hellish confection.

And like that CD, Filth Pig is a signpost for the times: furious, fucked up, yet undeniably attractive in its delirium. It's not with the program -- it is the program, gone completely out of control. Steel guitar treated with layers of electronic delay whiz through the mix like angry taxis in the night. The vocals, when they can be understood, are foul mutterings, nasty exhortations -- but overall they're a natural part of the sonic environment Al Jourgensen and his musical partner Paul Barker have created. They're like the din of conversation in the FleetCenter before a rock show -- a swell of garble that makes sense as part of the scene (imagine how damn weird it would be if an arena were dead-ass silent before a gig: Twilight Zone time), even though only snatches of individual, nearby conversations are understandable. And those float by unencumbered by context.

Like most things in our culture today, including people's hearts and minds, Filth Pig is not wholly penetrable. The psychobabble, the rhythmic intensity, the layers of hard noise, the unstoppable rush of momentum the CD rides -- they all become ends unto themselves. It's the same way our jobs, our destinations, our attainment of paychecks have all become what we are -- even though they're not. Real life is simply mistaken for the events that mark its passage. And Filth Pig can't be understood as much as felt or emotionally interpreted as we hear it carom past.

Which isn't to say Big Al and the gang are masked, necessarily. I'm sure that the serial killer who seems to be lurking beneath so much of Ministry's recent music is a calculated pose Jourgensen's cultivated for the group. Otherwise he probably would have come unglued during his late-fall heroin bust and tried eating the liver of one of his jailers. Or human flesh would be in the band's tour-contract rider.

My reading is that Jourgensen and Barker are bouncing our busy, confusing, peaceless world back at us to deliver one simple message: "We're all fucked." And once that point's made and accepted, the idea is to try to have as much fun as possible.

I've always thought of Ministry as a "fun" band despite all their cultural reflection, post-hardcore seriousness, and raw muscle burn. How else to regard the music of a lunatic screaming "connect the goddamn dots" over tracks that make war footage seem sonically tame? Addiction, murder, the Devil, greed, and the six other Deadly Sins -- along with Jesus, hot rods, and livestock -- make such frequent appearances in Ministry's more-or-less (or is that less-is-more?) lyrics that their shit's gotta be camp. If nothing else, Jourgensen's too smart a guy to take so many twisted obsessions to heart. After all, he's kept Ministry up and running ever-stronger for nearly 15 years. And just look at the man. Could anyone sporting shades, cowboy hat and boots, dreadlocks, and a Fu Manchu 'stache fronting a group that sounded like a buffalo herd on the Lollapalooza '92 stage be serious? Connect the goddamn dots.

Actually, there is one gap in Ministry's history that's hard to bridge. It's the stylistic leap from their '83 debut album, With Sympathy, on Arista, to the rest of their career. New-wave dance pop doesn't get any wussier than that album. The record, which Jourgensen has since disowned, makes Depeche Mode sound like Fugazi. Al says it's all Arista's fault, that the best songs he was writing at the time were channeled to other artists, like Ric Ocasek, and what he got was a pile of droppings from dance producers and songwriters. Guess he played and recorded at gunpoint too.

Either way, a big change of heart or strategy occurred when Jourgensen and Barker leapt to the Chicago-based Wax Trax! label that same year. Ministry's five subsequent albums and Jourgensen and Barker's collaborations in Revolting Cocks, 1,000 Homo DJs, Lard (with Jello Biafra), Pailhead (with Fugazi's Ian MacKaye), Acid Horse, Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters, and Lead into Gold are sufficient atonement for With Sympathy -- and qualify both men as a cottage industry unto themselves.

By the time they moved from postmodern-music (yeah, call it "industrial" if you want) specialists Wax Trax! in '85, they'd perfected a Frankenstein approach of crafting tunes from samples, loads of electronic gizmos, hardcore tempos, and thrash-metal guitars, using a slice of stolen criminal brain for attitude. For listeners already familiar with performers like Foetus and Psychic TV, the slasher-film-soundtrack mentality of Ministry's '86 major-label debut, The Land of Rape and Honey, wasn't a surprise. But its sonic barrage was damn insistent. Surely the howling supreme being behind that album's "Deity" was malevolent as hell, glowering from behind the electronic smoke and mirrors of Jourgensen and Barker. Their music from The Land of Rape and Honey and its 1989 follow-up, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste, established the Ministry sound as a whirring ball of confusion -- a doper's mind fuck, but as far from Pink Floyd as Idi Amin was from Gandhi. (Hey, maybe Al should write a song about Amin called "Eat Your Heart Out.") The rest has been refinement, perfection, sculpting to a needlepoint the precise intensity that Jourgensen and Barker -- and on the new CD, drummer/collaborator Rey Washam -- want to come darting out of your stereo's speakers like a swarm of angry hornets.

Perhaps the most entertaining example of their medium-as-message craftsmanship to date is "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod," from '91. It's a collaboration with Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes, who indulges his bent for white-trash glossolalia over a drums/samples/guitar blur that cranks like a brakeless 18-wheeler cresting a mountaintop, then hurtling downhill. Who know what the song's about? (Maybe Oral Roberts does.) But it's a masterpiece of allusion. The meeting of the perpetually hyperventilating Haynes and Ministry was a collision made in Hell. After all, the sonic collages of Jourgensen and Barker are the aural equivalent of the cut-and-paste loops of operations, autopsies, and car wrecks the Surfers showed at concerts for years. And "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" became one of Warner Bros.'s best-selling singles of the year. Great video, too, with an apparently cranked Haynes practically frothing at the mouth.

The only quibble I have with Psalm 69 and Filth Pig is that Ministry's songcrafting seems to have settled into a formula that parallels one used by almost every wheedling heavy-metal band of the '70s and '80s. Which isn't to say they sound like Warrant, but nearly every song gets a long intro that establishes the heavy riff it rides on. On Filth Pig, a staccato slashing kicks "Useless" wide open; for "Dead Guy," it's those big, bright, crunchy guitars in a martial pose; "Lava" offers a drunken riff that tells us right away that anyone in its path is too pissed to wobble out of the way in time. How 'bout cutting to the chase a little more often? Or is this a test of our own overtaxed attention spans?

There are some exceptions. The hippest is "The Fall," which boasts an oddly swinging ride cymbal keeping tabs on a pig pile of steel guitars and electric six-strings that sound like souls wailing as they crisp in the Devil's toaster oven. Imagine Elvin Jones keeping time to a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Jourgensen and Barker mimicking Bob Dylan's introduction to his wildly romantic "Lay Lady Lay," a fuzzy throb of bass and butt-ugly guitar aping the original's pretty gliding chords, is a hoot. And so is Jourgensen's vocal. Over a sea of thrumming samples, he shouts the lyrics with a mix of longing and command that makes "lay upon my big brass bed" sound like a perverse order. That alone recasts the chestnut with an attitude that doesn't make for a healthy relationship.

But preserving the general health and welfare of the people has never been Ministry's bag. The raison d'être of Jourgensen and Barker can be summed up by the "aim; reload" refrain that leaps out of the sonic hailstorm of Filth Pig's opening track, "Reload." With a permanent twisted smirk, they've been taking pot shots at listeners for years, trying to bang their hollow-point bullets of aural sarcasm, social comment, and plain heebie-jeebies smack into our temples. This time, nearly every shot's popped straight into our minds' bullseye. And it's the listener's job to try to figure out why and how, since nothing's ever quite clear in Ministry's murky, complex world -- or our own. And that probably makes Jourgensen happy as a filth pig in shit.