MINISTRY

If your idea of prime MINISTRY is the maudlin goth rock of "Halloween", or worse yet, the twee new wave of "With Sympathy", chances are you gave up on Al Jourgensen long before this release. If you got your fill of his mechanized metal drone years ago, nothing on "Rantology" is going to make you fall back in love with the band. And man, if you've got any inkling of love in your heart for George W. Bush, this will be about as attractive to you as garlic to a vampire.

Fueled by the label's desire to put out another best-of, without totally milking the fanbase that already bought 2001's "Greatest Fits", "Rantology" offers the classics in tweaked or live form. You get "N.W.O"., "Jesus Built My Hotrod", "Thieves", "Stigmata", and even more recent chestnuts like the coyly subtle "No W". and "Wrong". Many of the older tunes' samples have been replaced with newer sound bytes damning W. to the point where the most staunch liberal might want Al to just shut up and play his guitar. Lone new song "The Great Satan" is more of the same — thrashy riffing, a bunch of TV news samples, Jourgensen's ranting distorted vocals, and 1990-era industrial noises and effects we'd rip anyone else to shreds for using.

"Rantology" is another indication that, sixteen years after creating the watershed industrial metal album ("The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste"),MINISTRY's pretty much still on autopilot. Whether that's a bad thing or not is up to you — after all, if you're going to listen to this stuff, why not get it from the guy who practically invented it? But MINISTRY are increasingly a band one buys, or buys into, as a political statement, or a declaration of allegiance to a sound that grew, flourished, withered, died, and spread its influence into all realms of metal, industrial and electronica, all while Grandpa Al nodded off in front of the TV, murmuring about them damn Republicans. "Remixes" be damned, this is a cash grab, and even big fans of these one trick ponies should wait for next year's studio album instead.