Before he was roaring against the machine and became a metal and industrial icon, Al Jourgensen started Ministry as a synth pop band. That’s right, the group’s 1983 debut album With Sympathy was a dancey, keyboard-driven affair that got some regional radio airplay and a small amount on MTV for the goth-tinged anthem “Revenge.” The album was synth-heavy but featured guitar on three tracks including the funky “I Wanted to Tell Her” (featuring female singer Shay Jones) and the R&B-ish “Say You’re Sorry.” The album is an interesting curio, especially if you’re used to the heavier sounds that first emerged with their 1986 sophomore album Twitch and later efforts like that.
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Jourgensen once called With Sympathy a “sonic abortion” as Arista Records forced him into a new-wave image makeover and to record a commercial album as opposed to the more aggro tracks that came out later. Being a young, inexperienced artist who needed a big break, he was steered into that direction, but once that album cycle was over he got off the label as fast as possible.
“My hatred for this record was so deep,” Jourgensen told Yahoo! Music last year. “As a matter of fact, the two-inch [master] tapes of it, the actual two-inch tapes, I had a barbecue party and I burned them on a barbecue. So, there’s no existing original With Sympathys. I just burned them.”
He has come to peace with the album in recent years, recognizing it as part of his artistic evolution but also acknowledging that it at least put him on the map. Watch the video for “Revenge” and you can already see the angry young Jourgensen emerging in that tune. And last year, Ministry played that song live for the first time since 1984. The band’s frontman has said that four songs from With Sympathy—“Revenge,” “Effigy,” “Work for Love,” and “Here We Go”—will be rerecorded in a heavier vein.
Why the change of heart? In 2020, Jourgensen showed up (inebriated) to a show by With Sympathy, a Ministry tribute band that only plays songs from that era. He was amazed by the audience’s response.
“I had no idea people even knew what ‘Work for Love’ was!” he recalled to Yahoo! “I saw like 800 people on a Tuesday night really responding to this, and just went like, ‘Whoa. I don’t get it.’ So, actually, the next day I went back and listened to the album—and I hated it as much as ever! But seeing it in action, I was impressed—like, ‘OK, there’s something there.’ I could see why people would maybe like this. … And then it brought back a flood of different emotions and all that. By the end of that night, seeing that band made me go, ‘OK, this is not something to be so angry about for the rest of your life. This is OK. Let it go.’ … That night I went, ‘You know what? Yeah. F–k it. Instead of being owned, let’s own it.’”
Such a musical transformation is not unique in the industry. When Trent Reznor started Nine Inch Nails, it followed his time in more synth-pop and new wave projects like Slam Bamboo, Lucky Pierre, and Exotic Birds, the latter having cameoed as the band The Problems in the Michael J. Fox movie Light Of Day. But then with a name and musical change with NIN’s 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine, he went in a more aggressive electro direction, and by the early ’90s had brought guitars into the mix thanks to the influence of future Filter frontman Richard Patrick. Pantera also underwent a heavier makeover evolving from a glam band with a different singer in the 1980s to the Cowboys from Hell lineup with Phil Anselmo that would influence the nu metal sounds of the mid to late 1990s. Billy Joel did a reverse switch, starting with the proto-metal band Attila in 1969 before transforming into the more melodic piano man we know today.
Ministry’s With Sympathy album has remained a curio and something that hardcore fans have known about. When the band played “Revenge” live last year, they imbued it with guitar heaviness not present in the original. This year, Jourgensen and Ministry plan to play songs from With Sympathy and Twitch at the 2024 Cruel World Festival in Los Angeles, and it will be interesting to hear what kind of a sonic makeover the early songs get from their original, synth-driven origins. Stranger things, right?
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