Ministry - 'The Last Dubber'

Surprisingly conservative remixes highlight the strength of the original songs by industrial metal’s forefathers, proving that less can be more.

Ministry may have been the biggest industrial band the world has ever seen. Referring to them in the past tense may not be appropriate, however, considering that following their final proper studio release, 2007’s The Last Sucker, they unleashed a covers album, Cover Up, last year.

And a few months ago, the live CD/DVD package Adios…Puta Madres, highlighting their final tour (C U LaTour), saw the light of day. So following suit, their just-released remix album, The Last Dubber, offering tweaked interpretations of songs from The Last Sucker, is perhaps, in some sense, the involuntary post-mortem twitches of a machine that refuses to die.

For a band that bases so much of it’s music on electronic manipulation, one might expect some kind of grand scheme with their remix album, perhaps featuring a vast collaboration of musicians? While it’s far from being an ordinary remix album in which artists minimally “revamp” individual tracks by simply layering a dance beat underneath the original song, the approach on The Last Dubber is relatively conservative considering this is Ministry we’re talking about.

A member of Ministry side project Revolting Cocks, Clayton Workbeck retools the majority of the tracks on hand, with the exception of “Let’s Go (Dawn of Oblivion Mix)” by John Bechtel (Killing Joke, Ministry and False Icons) and “The Last Sucker (Hardware Revamp Mix)” by one DJ Hardware.

Not surprisingly, with one man primarily steering the ship—or manning the mixing boards, as it were—there is a thread of continuity throughout The Last Dubber. Differentiating this from the original CD from which the songs are based is a more sedated, calm and trance-inducing quality. With that said, at the end of the day, these remixes essentially stand as a reminder of how good The Last Sucker is.