Pure
Jello
by Carly Carioli
The latest
from Lard -- former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra's occasional collaboration
with Ministry's Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker, and William Rieflin -- is a
return to top form for all involved. Lately Ministry have sounded like
predictable thrash sludge, but on Pure Chewing Satisfaction (Alternative
Tentacles) they've rediscovered their crisp cybersmith edginess, hammering
out The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste-era metal machine music for the
masses -- trashcan beats pacing stiff, programmed guitar riffs somewhere
between Kill 'em All-vintage Metallica and bit-mapped transcriptions of
the Stooges. Keyboard-generated swirls, samples, and echoes make a few
cameos, but the overall effect is stripped-down industro-metal.
\par Jello
plays the human foil, the yippie/punk rascal whose nasal sneer and cartoon
vibrato still owe a debt to Johnny Rotten (he even appropriates the "We
mean it, man" line from "God Save the Queen" to self-effacing effect on
Pure's "Peeling Back the Foreskin of Liberty"). He's always been at his
best when, in surveying the carnival of absurdity that lurks in the shadow
of the American dream, he pinpoints the moment in which folly becomes outrage.
"I Wanna Be a Drug-Sniffing Dog" is a textbook example as raucously funny
and stinging as the old DKs material. "I wanna be a drug-sniffing dog/So
I can snort coke all night long/Bite my master when it suits me/Get off
on diminished capacity," he yammers. Next come customs agents masturbating
to confiscated panties, San Francisco cops purloining cars in trumped-up
drug raids, and a brilliantly brutal swipe at religious fundamentalists:
"I wanna join the Christian Coalition, so I can molest my children/None
suspect me 'cause I've been saved, 'til my stepdaughter drowns her kids
in a lake."
Occasionally
Biafra gets bogged down in (albeit clever) sloganeering -- "Faith Hope
and Treachery," "War Pimp Renaissance." But "Generation Execute" -- a parable
about hypocritical sex-and-violence attitudes in which capital punishment
becomes TV's new game-show ratings booster -- proves he's still the pre-eminent
countercultural voice in underground rock.