After three years of moving across the country and on-again, off-again heroin addiction, Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker have finally released the follow-up to the Grammy-nominated Psalm 69.

Ministry is a band that evolved from synth-pop industrial to skull-jarring metal, styles whose fans rarely overlap. The band laid the groundwork for its more successful imitators (Nine Inch Nails and White Zombie, whose singer even ripped off Jourgensen’s appearance), but as these bands evolve, Ministry stagnates.

Reload, the opener, begins where Psalm 69 left off. Its staccato, upbeat instrumentalization gets the blood flowing for the first minute or so, but its repetition gets boring very quickly.

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The title track slows the pace to a Melvins crawl. Its heaviness is so thick that it’s almost physical, but at six minutes 30 seconds, it’s at least twice as long as it should be.

Lava has a 1-2 beat that matches the throbbing of a nasty headache. Two-measure changes do nothing to ward off monotony. Jourgensen’s growling vocals sound like a large dog interrupted during its dinner, barking profane adjectives about life and the world.

The next several songs delve into more traditional-sounding metal. Crumbs has the familiar triplet picking used by many heavier bands. The vocals on Useless sound like Star Wars’ C-3PO after a tracheotomy. Its bass, which holds the song together in a semi-cohesive form, is heavy enough to lean up against. Jourgensen must have donned his Helmet on Dead Guy; his Zack De La Roche (Rage Against The Machine) rap-style delivery is a new twist for him.

The CD finally gets interesting with Game Show. It begins with eerie-sounding samples that flow into chirps and clicks. The absence of a steady drumbeat allows the tune to drift away from the repetitiveness that plagues the album to this point.

The worst song on the CD is a twisted cover of Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay. The instruments mock the original with distortion and echoey vocals that will probably inspire Dylan to trade in his guitar and hippie ideals for a shotgun and a bullet with Jourgensen’s name on it.

The closer, Brick Windows, sounds like it belongs on a Nine Inch Nails tribute album.

Overall, Filth Pig chases its tail as it fails to rise above the mediocre. I don’t know if this is a result of Al’s hiatus from heroin, but look what happened to Jimmy Page and Keith Richards when they went clean the music suffered. C+

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