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What is there left to do when you’ve spent most of your life hurling turds into the whirring spokes of popular music?
For Al Jourgensen, Ministry mastermind and one of heavy music’s best-loved eccentrics, the answer appears to be ‘Like before, but more, more, more!’ Surgical Meth Machine is a flagrantly unsavoury and musically extreme eruption of bile, belligerence and the blackest of humour. It makes Ministry’s most brutal moments sound like Taylor Swift ballads, as Mad Uncle Al thrusts the sequenced kick drums way into the red. It is also very, very funny, as our hero assails anyone and everyone, eyeballs swivelling in some drug-ruined state of euphoric glee, with profanity and gibberish in plentiful and equal supply.
There’s a cover of Devo’s Gates Of Steel that sounds like Andrew WK after an amphetamine enema and a simply deranged, five-minute explosion of glitchy beats, scabrous noise and verbal diarrhoea called, with typical honesty, Unlistenable.
This is the fastest, loudest, snottiest and most supremely insane thing that Al Jourgensen has ever done. He still doesn’t give a fuck and the results are ridiculous, terrifying and quite brilliant.
