Warthur This live album is, perhaps, Ministry's finest moment. Leaning harder on the metallic side of their sound and veering further away from electronics, it consists of a short, angry blast of aggression using some of the post powerful and visceral songs selected from The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste. It's a compact set offering everything which was thrilling and cutting edge about Ministry back at the dawn of the 1990s, drawn from some of their best albums, and the live context adds a little extra dose of fury which never quite translated into their studio albums of the era. Brilliant.

SilentScream213 A lot of really good ideas and unique aspects to this album that were groundbreaking at the time. Probably most later Industrial Metal bands used this thing as a blueprint. The speedy, riff-focused parts of this are great, like Tv 2 and Hero, which rip along at chainsaw shredding speed. Al usually sounds good, which a very gruff yet nasally yell that is no doubt processed with some distortion.

What really ruins this album for me is the insane repetitiveness, especially in the annoying samples. Most of the songs here have parts where some vocal sample is repeated about 16 times, and it’s abundant with random shout or spoken samples that are thrown in at the rate of a snare drum. On the same note, even when the guitar riffs and rhythm section are good, it quickly goes stale after the same measure has been repeated about 32 times. There’s very little variety to each track, making each one more or less based around one repetitive section.

The title track is an example that almost uses samples well, specifically the choir vocals that add an epic touch to it, but then the rest of the track falls into the same habit of throwing in voices and what not so much that it just becomes annoying. Despite the abundance of interesting and unique ideas here, it’s something I have no desire to revisit because of how annoying it can be.

SilentScream213 The album starts off quite energetically, with some simple yet aggressive and heavy riffs and some artificial but effective beats with some nice double bass work giving it some extra power. After the first couple of songs, it shifts more towards Electro-Industrial territory and loses its metallic edge. It also slows down considerably, and relies on sampling to break its simple, repetitive beats. Most of the non-musical noises thrown in add little to the sound and are usually just abrasive for the sake of being abrasive. The instrumental tracks are especially hard to bear, as Al’s manic, crazed vocals are one of the main appeals to the album.

An incredibly unique record when it was first conceived, and highly influential to Industrial Metal and other similar circles of music. Today, it is too simple and limited without offering any staying power to hold up very well.

Warthur Twitch is the - in my opinion sorely underrated - bridge between early Ministry and their later industrial metal form that debuted on The Land of Rape and Honey. When I say "early Ministry" here I don't mean the gothy synthpop stylings of their debut album, With Sympathy - nothing else in their discography really sounds like that - but instead the Ministry of their early singles, stuff like Everyday Is Halloween or All Day (the latter of which has a remix represented here). The album is very much on the EBM side of electronic industrial, but it's also on the harder-edged side of that - it'd just take someone picking up a guitar and matching the synth riffs on it to tip this over the edge into industrial metal.

Warthur This album-length compilation is, arguably, really more of an EP with a bonus remix EP tacked onto the end, since you are presented here with four original songs - each of them a significant early Ministry single - along with four remixes of them, and to be honest I tend to stop listening before the remixes kick in.

By far the best song on here is Everyday is Halloween, a far more successful goth anthem than anything on Ministry's uncharacteristic debut album With Sympathy. (Yeah, Al and pals are still mimicing the British goth pioneers, but they do a better job of capturing the scene's attitude and producing something which might have done heavy duty on turntables at the Batcave club back in the day.) The other songs on here are more transitional pieces towards Ministry's more well-known industrial style.