#michael balch

Trent Reznor during his touring with Revolting Cocks in 1990 + Supernaut audio from the live gig. If you have something else with RevCo!Trent please share in your reposts, thank you. I really like to search and compilate rare Trent things together.

Ministry Psalm 69 / ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ (1992)

Since Ministry told the Arista label and 1983′s With Sympathy to go fuck themselves, Al Jourgensen transformed himself from a charming and nouveau-romantic synth-pop darling to a toxic and dangerous industrial-metalist. 1985’s Twitch allowed himself to start the process, and 1988’s The Land Of Rape And Honey signified no turning back. By then, he all but disowned his With Sympathy roots as Arista made him to be something he wasn’t, obliging him to  do talk shows and soda commercials. Their then-label Sire placed huge bets on Ministry right after The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste (1991) amidst drug addictions and deteriorating relationships amongst most of their personnel. Here comes Psalm 69, considered to be the band’s most popular and successful moment. It was safe to say that this record had zero say about heartbreak, frustration, or personal feelings. They were way over that. Politics, addiction, the anti-spirituality and anti-religion reigned supreme on what was their most dangerous-sounding album yet which featured Jourgensen, Paul Barker (bass), Bill Rieflin (drums), Mike Scaccia (guitar), Lou Svitek (guitar), and former Front Line Assembly member Michael Balch (synths).

The first few salvos of “N.W.O.” declare war and go into battle. Jourgensen goes double direction on vocals both growling low and soaring high as pummeling drums and blast-off riffs dig deep as a two-pronged attack through George Bush soundbytes. Psalm 69 by then would liberally use samples from film and television (Wise Blood, Blue Velvet, Apocalyspe Now) until again with its’ Bush-trilogy starting with 2004’s Houses Of The Mole. It’s “Just One Fix” where the record makes an even scarier turn as Ministry’s own drug declaration, charging out of the gate through the real-life loop dilemma of the band’s heroin use (“Life keeps slipping away / fighting in a war with damnation”). Drugs had been such a major fixture for the band that William S. Burroughs made an appearance in the single’s video and the non-album track “Quick Fix”. Early on we’re introduced to the outfit’s long-going motif in “T.V. II”, Ministry’s flash-firing succession of alternating television bytes and scribbling riffs with shouting fast vocals (”connect the goddamn dots!”) blows minds in their message against mass-consumerism. Aside from all the serious controversy Psalm 69 already delivered in its first songs, it’s also well-known that Ministry has a southern-tinged sense of humor. Here comes “Jesus Built My Hot Rod” racing down the strip knowing there’s no tomorrow. It’s one of the bands’ glaring highlights with The Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes blabbering nonsensical gibberish all for the fun of it as the record’s lead single goes out of control toward the black flag at the end of side A.

One of the band’s moments of doom comes to darkness in “Scarecrow”, which sonically replicates Christ’s slow tortuous march on the cross without even realizing it. If one knows their drum lines, Barker may have gotten them from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” (1971) and Killing Joke got it from either one of them for “Pandemonium” (1994). “Scarecrow” leads us to more non-glorious times on the self-titled track, a play on both chapter #69 of The Book Of Lies (Crowley, 191?) and the Greek word for ‘head’. When asked to give a little love back to God, Ministry throws it back in His face for the album’s most punishing and scathing track, heaving and charging into non-conformity. Fight through “Corrosion” to the end of the tunnel, only to find yourself trapped with no escape to witness the cataclysmic and the world’s destruction on “Grace”. A hellish miasma of bombastic drums, ruinous noise, and terrifying screams are abruptly ended by marching machines spomping to domination.