* Ministry

DARK SIDE OF THE SPOON

(Warner Bros.)

The picture of the naked obese woman in a dunce cap on the cover -- aside from simply being the sort of gross-out image that Al Jourgensen has always favored -- is almost certainly meant to suggest one possible interpretation of the quite excellent album title. But anyone familiar with the Ministry lifestyle will know that when Jourgensen alludes to a "spoon" he's generally not using it to eat with. And so Dark Side of the Spoon is either a brilliant conceptual piece in which Ministry -- now just Jourgensen and programmer Paul Barker plus a new drummer, a guitarist, and some "additional personnel" -- play the part of a band whose creative energies have been so sapped by drug addiction that they just keep making the same album over and over again, sounding less and less inspired with each successive effort, or it's an album by a band who really are so damaged by drug abuse that all of the above is actually true. Either way, coming from the techno-industrial outlaws who singlehandedly (or maybe with a little help from Trent Reznor) appeared to reinvent heavy metal for the digital age on 1992's Psalm 69: The Way To Succeed and the Way To Suck Eggs (Sire) and the Lollapalooza tour that followed, Dark Side of the Spoon is a pretty disappointing effort. Or, more accurately, it's just more of the same dense programmed thrash and dirge metal with junkie-gothic overtones that was already starting to sound dated on 1996's Filth Pig (Warner Bros.).

-- Matt Ashare