Adios… Puta Madres

On a list of those who you’d expect to leave you with a tear-inducing farewell, Al Jourgensen falls somewhere between Count Chocula and Charles Manson. But alas, as Mr. Jourgensen belts out “What a Wonderful World” and balloons fall onto a capacity audience to close out the final chapter of Ministry, one can’t help but shed a tear… likely into a bottle of Jack. Ministry’s Adios… Puta Madres 2 DVD set documents the band’s final tour from rehearsals to their final gigs in Europe.

“Fuchi Requiem,” the unfortunately shorter of the two discs, is a documentary covering the band’s final tour. The story begins at Al Jourgensen’s Sonic Ranch, 45 miles outside of El Paso, where the band “rehearsed like 12 hours a day and drank like 20 hours a day.” Tales from the ranch include Al shitting himself every time he tries to channel the Lizard King for “Roadhouse Blues” and beating a sleeping Tommy Victor with a dead skunk… a bit like a white trash Sadian summer camp. The journey continues as the band hits the road and brings their farewell tour across the world and, most entertainingly, encounters countless Spinal Tap-esque problems with 2nd-rate versions of their infamous fences, which came close to maiming certain band members at various points. Most “effectively,” however, “Fuchi Requiem” displays a charm in Ministry’s last lineup; Tommy Victor (Prong, Danzig), Sin Quirin (Society 1, Revolting Cocks), Tony Campos (Static X), John Bechdel, and Aaron Rossi; that forces the audience to stop resenting them for replacing icons of Industrial like Paul Barker, Bill Rieflin, and Chris Connelly.

“En Vivo” is a compilation of live footage, shot mostly at European festivals (which, it must be noted, boasted much more attractive audiences than those stateside gigs which were largely comprised of hairy hillbillies and the kind of people who wear cargo shorts). The DVD portrays the band playing behind the classic fences, to crowds of several thousand, having the band look more gloriously decadent than they have in over a decade, despite the fact that the majority of the songs they’re playing (from their trilogy of radio metal political concept albums) are pretty lame to put it mildly. Fortunately, the triteness of the songs is well overshadowed by the grandiosity of the world’s most epic Industrial group. Unlike the audio counterpart to Adios… Puta Madres (with a slightly different tracklisting), this DVD includes the brief oasis of the classics that were thrown into the setlist every night. Those four tracks (“So What,” “N.W.O.,” “Just One Fix,” and “Thieves”) alone, along with the aforementioned cover of “What a Wonderful World,” will remind fans of the beauty of The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste and why they started listening to Ministry in the first place. Actually… come to think of it, you may just want to skip to track 11 (“So What”) and forget that any of those “metal” albums ever existed. – Izzy Cihak