Review Summary: 10/10, would laugh like a motherfucker again.
The Land of Rape and Honey occupies a bit of a strange crossroads, not only within
Ministry’s discography, but also in industrial music. Industrial was already fairly electronic, but bands like
Coil and
Throbbing Gristle had enough variety in both instrumentation and approach that it rarely felt like it was just electronica. Industrial came to mean something different from the mid-80s onwards, however; what was once about being as anti-musical as possible and dicking around with samples against ambient or noisy soundscapes gave way to more overtly electronic sounds, more synthesizers and distorted guitars, processed drum beats, and reliance on hooks. Perhaps this dates as early as 1982 with the advent of
Front 242, but I’m not really familiar with EBM that isn’t
Nitzer Ebb, so don’t quote me on that. However, the shift to the more electronic, and dare I say poppy, sound of was already underway, with bands like
Skinny Puppy, and Ministry, originally a synthpop band, became so increasingly fascinated with the burgeoning industrial scene that they became an industrial band themselves and are often credited as the first industrial metal band, culminating in their first truly industrial release,
The Land of Rape and Honey.
The opener “Stigmata” is easily the album’s most famous song, and also frontman Al Jourgensen’s least favourite, and I can kind of see why. It’s the only song on the album to sampled guitars rather than live, and it’ll probably be especially obvious to any producers or anyone who’s studied audio production; the song seems to have been made in a similar fashion to several Young Gods songs, in that it’s a song apparently constructed around a guitar sample, though it doesn’t feel quite as natural as the Young Gods at their best. Keen ears can notice the point where the sample loops and repeats, and it’s not really representative of the album beyond the first three or four songs, but all that being said, it’s still a banger.
“The Missing” and “Deity” are the most metal songs on the album, so metal in fact that I find it hard to describe them individually on their own terms; I’d say “The Missing” is more straightforward, and “Deity” is more bass-heavy and with slightly more technical drumming. Otherwise, they both sound heavily derivative of the Bay Area’s thrash metal scene, though Al Jourgensen has said that punk was a stronger influence, which checks out considering he named
Killing Joke as a strong influence:
“In the 70s, what thrash was there? Punk came on, and that was cool. But there was no thrash. There were dinosaur big bands, and that was great. Those were my influences.”
-Al Jourgensen in an interview with Pitchfork
“Golden Dawn” is an about-face from the bursts of aggression that the first three songs were; this is one of the few songs where live drums are played, and they’re so powerful that they cut through everything else in the mix. There’s also an equally imposing live bassline that never changes, though what keeps this song from being boring is the alternation between samples from Ken Russell’s film
The Devils and recordings of Aleister Crowley and his peer Israel Regardie chanting (which is probably where the song’s title comes from) to create a story of suspected association with Satan, with demands for a confession and shouts of “THE ANTICHRIST!!” The sample placement and sequencing is brilliant, and quite frankly I find it the most consistently impressive aspect of every Ministry album I’ve heard.
“Destruction” has a percussive forcefulness that recalls the early work of
Einstürzende Neubauten; live and sampled drums comingle while Jourgensen’s shouts of “destruction” loop and overlap until it creates an overwhelming din that gives way to samples of machinery. “Hizbollah” is one of two bonus songs, and one of a few that seems to have been designed to turn up a dance floor; it has the most prominent synth part yet, forceful percussion, and also a sample of the Lebanese singer Fairuz, and the result is almost ritualistic.
The title track should probably be the dullest of the bunch because of the simplistic “kick-snare” beat and the equally uncomplicated synth line, but the samples are so well-arranged that the drums and the samples together create a militaristic vibe. Unfortunately, some Neo-Nazis latched onto the samples from Nazi rallies and thought Jourgensen was endorsing their views, though this couldn’t be farther from the truth; the industrial scene has a history of using Nazi and classical fascist imagery from World War II and the years leading up to it in ironic fashion, and Boyd Rice (perhaps better known as
NON) and maybe also
Death in June are the only bands I’m aware of that actually believe the far-right nonsense they sample. The title also has far quainter origins than initially appears; it derives from the former offensively ill-advised logo of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, whose best known for harvesting rapeseed (which is now known as canola), though it’s since been changed for obvious reasons. Lastly, Jourgensen is quite liberal, and though I haven’t heard any Ministry albums beyond
Psalm 69, I gather that most of their 2000’s albums are openly critical of Bush Jr.’s administration.
“You Know What You Are” features a pulsating synth loop that ascends but almost always returns to the root note, and also features samples from Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy,
Aliens, and
Platoon. A laugh from
A Fistful of Dollars is creatively incorporated into the rhythm, and Jourgensen’s vocals are at their harshest; his voice is so distorted he sounds like he’s auditioning for a place among the Nazgûl from
Lord of the Rings. “I Prefer” is the second bonus track, and a disappointment in an otherwise consistent track listing; it’s not bad by any means, it’s just that it’s too damn short. It’s the fastest song since “Deity”, and it ends right when it sounds like it’s going somewhere.
“Flashback” has a rhythm that’s quite reminiscent of mid-80s Neubauten, and by that I mean it sounds a lot like “Yü-gung”, but faster and more combative. Given the clipping, it sounds like there’s too much gain on Jourgensen’s mic, and I find the shouty delivery makes the graphic lyrics so silly in an edgelord kind of way that it almost comes around to being comical, though the double-time drum beat’s so infectious that I can easily get lost in that alone. Also of note is the guitar solo, which is so inhumanly fast that I strongly suspect tape manipulation, because, you know, industrial.
“Abortive” is a curiously restrained choice of closer, considering how hard the rest of this album goes, and though I think “Flashback” would’ve made for a fine closer, this also works. It’s another sample-based instrumental like “Golden Dawn”, though it’s considerably more electronic, with tremolo synths that soundtrack a NASA launch. Also like “Golden Dawn”, the samples make the song, and this is especially true of “Abortive” because there’s more of a progression to it, with preparation and a successful launch.
I mentioned before that the album inhabits a crossroads in the grand scheme of industrial music, and having explored the album in what I hope was a satisfactorily illustrative fashion, this bears further explanation. In many ways
The Land of Rape and Honey represents the shape of industrial to come, with programmed drums, overdriven guitars, and prodigious vocal effects, but in another way it’s also more industrial than the industrial that followed, and by that I mean more industrial in the Throbbing Gristle sense; TG were heavily inspired by William S. Burroughs’ method of tape splicing, and Ministry, at least at this stage, also looked to that technique for inspiration, and it’s pretty cool how that came around on this album that’s otherwise more emblematic of the changes that would occur in what became the post-industrial scene, and indeed were already underway. This mix of old and new techniques gives
The Land of Rape and Honey a variety that I find sorely lacking in other Ministry albums;
Psalm 69 and
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste are both good times, but they lean so far into the metal and rock aspect of their sound that I don’t love either of them like I love this album.
I’m not entirely sure why this album’s often credited as the first industrial metal record, however; there’s no doubt in my mind that this album inspired several later industrial metal bands, but it’s not really metal beyond the first three songs, so
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, and also
Streetcleaner by
Godflesh, have far better claims to being the first of that subgenre. Disappointing bonus track notwithstanding, the only criticism I have is that the mastering hasn’t stood the test of time in some places; the synths still sound fresh, for the most part, but everything else you can tell was recorded in the late ‘80s. The live instrumentation especially suffers from this, though the lo-fi sound does make it more charming than something like, say,
Pretty Hate Machine by
Nine Inch Nails, because Trent Reznor’s made a name for himself as a diligent producer with a such a keen attention to detail that he’s even making film scores now, whereas Ministry, as of 1988, seem content to mostly just make bursts of bellicosity. With one foot in the industrial of old and the other in the future,
The Land of Rape and Honey is an excellent reference point for how the genre developed. While it could stand to be remastered, it has enough abrasion and vitriol to presumably satisfy most metalheads, and if you like industrial but somehow haven’t heard this classic,
why the hell aren’t you listening to it?
Favourite tracks: “Flashback”, “Golden Dawn”, “You Know What You Are”, “Abortive”, “Hizbollah”, “Stigmata”, “The Missing”
Least favourite: “I Prefer”
The Pitchfork Interview:
Jourgensen, Al. Interview by Cosmo Lee. Ministry. 17 June 2008. https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6874-interview-ministry/
