Ministry strode the alternative music world like a colossus during the late '80s and early '90s, placing one huge foot in the domain of industrial music, then another in the domain of heavy metal, dwarfing the aggressive capabilities of its contemporaries and sounding surprisingly tuneful while doing it. After 1992's
Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, though, the band disintegrated around leader
Alain Jourgensen, and
Ministry limped through the rest of the '90s with a pair of desultory, deliberately difficult records,
Filth Pig and
The Dark Side of the Spoon. Nearly a decade after
Ministry's peak, 2003's
Animositisomina returned the group to the quality of its Wax Trax prime, with an opener (the title track) that ranks up there with classics like "Burning Inside" and "Just One Fix."
Ministry is still hell-bent on the kind of rigid, hooky thrash metal that fewer groups were interested in with the rise of nu-metal and rap-metal, but the bandmembers prove their chops; they may look like lords of drug-addled doom and gloom, but they're a great band with energy left to burn.
Animositisomina nods to the group's new wave past with a cover of
Magazine's "The Light Pours out of Me," and occasionally inspires vocal and melodic comparisons to
Jane's Addiction, the band's rivals (and polar opposites) in the alternative metal scene of the late '80s. Still dour and humorless, but pruned of its experimental tendencies,
Ministry delivered its first solid record in a decade. ~ John Bush