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Ministry > Filth Pig > Reviews > artrucho
Ministry - Filth Pig

Uncle Al and band on downers. - 60%

artrucho, May 8th, 2013

This was the first album by the band that I ever saw in stores, and the striking album artwork made me wonder what kind of band Ministry was (at the time I was 15 and into very different genres) but I never got around to doing so. I finally listened to it this year, after going through TMIATTTT and Psalm 69, two albums I immediately enjoyed, and arrived to Filth Pig with high expectations. Those expectations were pretty much crapped on after one listen, for this is not the brutal Ministry from before or after. I happen to also love sludge and slow tempo stuff, but not with the name Ministry attached to it. It was a new direction for the band, and it wasn't a good one.

Musically speaking, nothing seems to be missing here: mechanical sounds, screaming distorted vocals, layers over layers of noise, all key ingredients to the Ministry sound. It's just that here, they're all controlled, almost harmless. Like they all took the biggest chill pill and recorded the album in the wake of its effects. It seems Al Jourgensen was sharing some of his downers with the rest of the band while recording Filth Pig...

Not everything is negative though, it has its good moments. The drums are not spectacular but they work well (I love them in "Dead Guy"), and the guitar work of Mike Scaccia -may he rest in peace- has always been dear to me. Uncle Al's lyrics are vicious and full of hate, and they have some brilliant passages ("You wanna lie like a dog/You're gonna wake up with fleas" -from "Reload") and some incomprehensible gibberish ("Lava"). But after several listens, the album as a whole is not a memorable one, and even though repetitiveness is par for the course in the industrial genre, when you mix that with a slow tempo, it turns into a droning, hypnotizing and boring affair. You're always left awaiting the pummeling onslaught of noise that we kind of expect from the band, but it only comes in small doses.

Filth Pig was a commercial failure when it came out, and I can see why: the band wanted to go in a more mainstream direction, away from the industrial foundations of their previous work, and a clear indicator of this was the cover of Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" used as the album's torchbearer (it's an interesting, trippy version for sure, I was never a fan of the original). In the end, it didn't work out the way they wanted. To me, this album has 3 great songs, 2 decent ones and the rest is completely toothless and forgettable.

Ministry would stumble again with their next album, Dark Side of the Spoon, until finally regaining their heavy, dirty and distorted footing with their 2003 album Animositisomina.

Highlights: "Lava", "Dead Guy", "Brick Windows".