Thursday, April 19, 2007

The land...

Where do all of these unexpected Ministry fans come from?

I keep bringing up Ministry as of late and people seem to love them.
I own two of their albums. One is decidedly not like the other. The Land of Rape and Honey is laden with drum loops and keyboards and samples. Filth Pig is practically the opposite with mostly live drums and mostly guitars. It's two different approaches to making the same kind of music. It's exactly the kind of thing that musicians do when they are tired of cranking out the same song over and over again, unlike the corporate companies that dominate what gets played on most commercial radio. (some of the comments on this link are great. Especially the one about NASCAR.) Again, what happens in the game of Monopoly when someone succeeds in creating a monopoly?


An (perhaps not so) interesting aside in my music appreciation travels:

Ministry covered Lay, Lady, Lay on Filth Pig. When I heard Bob Dylan singing that song, it was well after I had the Ministry version etched into my memory and that was, well, a shock.

Much like when my friend learned that Hunter isn't a Jared Leto song. She had no idea it was Bjork. Which rhymes with pork.

I've also heard rumors that Ministry isolates everything to the extreme when they record. Drum tracks are done one at a time. If that's true, that's mighty purist of them. I'd rather take the Albini route and just go for the ambient sound of "strategically place mics." But then again, I think I like a more "organic" feel to my music.

2 comments:

Dean ASC said...

One time I was tripping balls and Land of Rape and Honey started skipping in the CD player and I didn't notice it for like an hour.

I named my sailboat "Stigmata" after that.

Anonymous said...

As I said before, they are my favorite band. I have almost every album they made from their early synth-pop days of "with Sympathy" to their harder beyond industrial today with "Houses of the Mole".
I have seen them 3 times, Revolting Cocks once.