Ministry: The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste [MUSIC ON VINYL]

Why you'll love it

Music On Vinyl presses this one on 180g audiophile vinyl with an insert. It's the album where Al Jourgensen bolted thrash guitars onto industrial machinery, and "Thieves," "Burning Inside" and "So What" became the template for a decade of heavy music.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Insert included

About the album

By 1989 Ministry had already been a synth-pop band and a dance-floor industrial act, so a third reinvention barely raised an eyebrow in Chicago. Al Jourgensen had been listening to thrash bands like Stormtroopers of Death and Rigor Mortis, and he decided Ministry needed riffs, lots of them, played very fast. Sire put it out in November 1989.

Recorded at Chicago Trax with Paul Barker, Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly, the sessions ran on improvisation and sampling: Rieflin and Barker spent a month watching films and pulling sounds from them, and Connelly compared the method to the Surrealist game exquisite corpse. "Thieves" opens with a drill-sergeant sample and never lets up, "Burning Inside" is all pounding precision, and "So What" stretches into a slow, menacing epic. The production credit went to Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan, which are Jourgensen and Barker in disguise.

It became the blueprint for industrial metal, and its fingerprints are all over the heavy records of the 1990s. Our staff have been asked to play "Thieves" at a sensible volume, and we're told the meeting about it is still ongoing.

Also at Kops: more Ministry on vinyl · browse Industrial & Goth

Tracklist

Listen

On Sire / Music On Vinyl (cat# MOVLP993), a reissue of the 1989 album.