[Twitching] -- 40 years ago this week, Ministry released their second studio album, Twitch, which signaled a change from the new wave / synthpop of their debut to a more industrial sound. That means this is the album which finds Ministry becoming the band we know them to be.
It peaked near the bottom of the Billboard 200 (at #194), and critical reviews were rather middling. The album's sole single, "Over the Shoulder", failed to make a dent in the charts, any of them, really. But it's not a bad album. It is equal parts disturbing and danceable in all the right places for this genre. In fact, if you graphed this album on a spectrum, it would come in somewhere between the harder, or edgier, synthpop options of the mid-1980s and the industrial metal Ministry would come to embrace in the 1990s. But it is still closer to the synthpop, by a narrow margin.
Think of Twitch as an aural polaroid, a snapshot of an artist in transition. With that in mind, you can see (er, hear) the artist in the process of searching for the right sound to express the anger and angst in which they simmer. Maybe you'll even cheer for them.
Highlights include: "Isle of Man" (Version II), "Where You at Now? / Crash & Burn / Twitch (Version II)", the aforementioned "Over the Shoulder", and "All Day Remix".
Flashback: Twitch (March 12, 1986)
And that's all till next week. Dedicated 80s-philes can find more flashbacks in the Prophet or Madman archives or via Bookended's 80s Flashback tag. As always, your comments are welcome on today's, or any other, flashback post. And if you like what I'm doing here, please share the link with your friends. If, however, you don't like the flashback, feel free to share it with your enemies.
See you in seven!
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