Just like a car crash, Just like a knife, My favorite weapon, Is the look in your eyes. Looking back on an Iconic Industrial classic The Land of Rape And Honey 30 years on.
I remember the first time I heard Stigmata, the opening battle-cry of Ministry’s 1988 album The Land Of Rape And Honey. I thought perhaps I’d bought the wrong cassette.
Click here for our podcast counting down the best albums of 1988
I’d just bought it at a local music store (Camelot, remember them?), and was listening to it on the way back home. Upon hearing the seasick opening loops and the Exorcist style vocals I was floored.
Why the big surprise for a band known for its heavy industrial sound?
Because just a few years earlier, the band were a new wave synth-pop act with songs like Revenge and Everyday Is Halloween.
But frontman Alain Jourgensen was unhappy with label interference, and had a different musical vision in mind. He would later state that Ministry had sold out from the beginning, avoiding the treacherous path Gen-X alternative bands faced on major labels. He was working in reverse.
So with Land, he embraced Industrial music; harsh electronics, movie sound bites and distorted vocals. No more syrupy synths or faux-british singing stylings.
But what separated him from other industrial acts was his love of metal.
His combination of heavy guitar, electronic sequencers and drum machines would majorly influence Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie, and KMFDM among many other 90’s alt-rock bands.
But back to Stigmata; it was a horror show of a song, and a brilliant choice to kick off the album. Shredded vocals, relentless guitar and eerie keyboard loops were disorienting and nightmarish.
I remember that car ride back from the record store; as soon as I heard Jourgensen’s undead vocal croaking I looked at my friend. We were both creeped out, yet utterly riveted. But things were just getting started.
Follow up tracks The Missing and Deity were even more guitar-centric, the latter featuring a rockabilly beat.
Jourgensen was joined in the studio by bassist Paul Barker, vocalist Chris Connelly and drummer Bill Rieflin. His mix of live and programmed drums gave the album a jack hammer thrust that made you submit to the suffocating sound. (Jourgensen and Barker produced the album under the alias’ Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan).
The album also featured trippy, hallucinogenic trance tracks like Golden Dawn and Destruction.
Golden Dawn featured soundbites from the movie The Devils; “You are being found guilty of covenants with the devil,” “State your confession,” “Confess! Confess!” “The Anti-Christ”
My mom would give me worried looks when she heard me listening to this album. Fun times!
But the overall lyrical theme to the album wasn’t Satanism, but Fascism.
Jourgensen has always railed against authority, and groupthink, and Rape And Honey seemed focused on everything he despised; Neo-Nazism, Reaganism, and wartime atrocities.
Flashback features samples from Oliver Stone’s Platoon and appears to reference a soldier snapping from PSTD. Or it could be a man going on a killing spree from a drug fueled nadir. Either way it was brutal and unforgiving, with a whip crack beat and crazed screams from Jourgensen.
Tying the Anti-Fascism theme together is the disturbing album cover, which is a repurposed photo of a burned corpse in a Nazi concentration camp.
And as for that title; crazily enough, it’s a verbatim slogan from a Canadian town whose economy is based on agricultural products rapeseed and honey. But this would plant a seed (pun intended) for future album’s with twists of phrases like A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste and new album From Beer To Eternity.
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Likewise, the metallic aspects of Land would become a permanent sonic fixture of the band, culminating in 90’s classic Psalm 69, where the band seemed on the cusp of superstardom.
Click here for my review of the new Ministry album From Beer To Eternity
But, it didn’t. Drug issues derailed their progress and the sludge metal of Filth Pig alienated most of their fan base.
But Filth Pig is an unfairly maligned gem (which deserves an Albums Revisited post of its own at some point.)
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So that’s my reflections on The Land Of Rape And Honey. Does it bring back any memories for you? Do you agree of its seismic impact? What’s your favorite Ministry album? Comment below.
