Ministry, Animositisomina

It's 1991/2003. George (W) Bush is in the White House; war with Iraq is all but inevitable. Despite what those queer French postmodern theorists might tell us, we have clear and defined parameters: "What we are looking at is good and evil; right and wrong"/"You're either with us or against us". The ousting of Saddam would give way to "a new world order"/"a new regime of democracy". And Ministry release an album that proves that less is more, that all you need to do is play one riff for six minutes as long as it makes you smash your head against the pavement until the blood stings your eyes, until you see...

You get a good vibe from this puppy as soon as you see it. Everything about the sleeve is retro: classic American industrial-rock black and one-colour monochrome, fat plain font, symbols as punctuation. All this thing is missing is a Chris Connelly guest appearance. Quasi-totalitarian governments willing to rape and pillage personal freedoms for the sake of their own agendas = good music. It's a formula old as time itself. Shit, look at Stalin and Shostakovich. If you want to imagine the present, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. Then imagine thousands of people screaming and breaking everything around them until they die, trying to speak, trying to say something else, trying to find any fucking means at all of defining self. You didn't think Boy Wonder illegally seizing power would be all bad, did you?

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