Greetings, mortal fools, cosmic wanderers, and those who foolishly left a bowl of wet food out overnight thinking I wouldn’t knock it off the counter.
It is I, Psychic Meow Meow—seer of the unseen, scratcher of the velvet curtains of destiny, and absolute authority on all things noisy, dark, and utterly disappointing.
Today, the spirits demanded I channel my third eye toward the mortal realm’s latest auditory disaster: Ministry’s 17th—and supposedly final—studio album, Hate to Go – Take Out or Delivery.
Let me be clear: my whiskers twitched violently the second Uncle Al dropped this 46-minute piece of lukewarm garbage. I didn’t even need to gaze into the crystal litter box to know this album was going to stink worse than a fresh hairball on a silk rug, but I listened anyway—for you. And now my ears are bleeding static.
The Vision Was Bad. The Reality Is Worse.
When news broke that Al Jourgensen was rounding up the troops—including bringing back Paul Barker for a feature—I had a fleeting psychic vision: maybe, just maybe, we would get a glorious throwback to Psalm 69 or The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste.
Instead? What we got with Hate to Go – Take Out or Delivery is neither take-out nor delivery. It is the soggy, forgotten scrap left at the bottom of a dumpster behind a closed-down Denny’s at 3:00 AM.
The album kicks off with “Crickets”, which is ironically the exact sound the crowd will make when any of these tracks are played live. From there, we slide right into “Voices of Hate” and “Clown Car”. I have watched a laser pointer dot circle a blank wall for forty minutes with more emotional depth, structural complexity, and raw aggression than whatever riff recycling program Uncle Al used to paste these tracks together.
AI Voices and Recycled Aggression? Meow-lease.
The band bragged about incorporating “AI-generated voice snippets” into the mix as some grand, ironic critique of our modern tech dystopian tipping point.
Puh-lease. I am a psychic cat, and even I know when someone is using “irony” as a cheap substitute for actual songwriting. The samples sound like a malfunctioning smart fridge arguing with a GPS unit. It’s not edgy; it’s annoying. If I wanted to hear cold, soul-crushing robotic noise while someone yells about political dread, I’d just sit next to my human’s running Roomba while he reads the morning news.
Tracks like “The White Man Lied” and “Delete” feel so heavy-handed and derivative that my tail stayed flat in protest the entire time. Where is the venom? Where is the chaos? Where is the groove that used to make two-legged creatures smash their heads against concrete pillars in 1992? It’s completely gone, replaced by paint-by-numbers industrial metal chugging that feels lazier than my 14-hour afternoon nap.
A Final Whimper, Not a Bang
By the time the record crawled to its conclusion with “We’re Still Here”—a song title that feels less like a proud rally cry and more like an unwanted threat—I was ready to claw my own scratching post into toothpicks.
Ministry has spent decades screaming into the void, but on Hate to Go, the void is screaming back: “Please, hit pause.”
If this truly is Ministry’s swan song, then the swan didn’t fly gracefully into the sunset. It waddled directly into a ceiling fan.
The Psychic Verdict:
- Rating: 1 out of 5 Dead Mice 🐭 (and the mouse died of boredom).
- Future Horoscope for Al Jourgensen: I foresee a future where you retire peacefully, put down the distortion pedal, and step away from the mic before you hurt yourself or my ears any further.
- Final Advice: Keep your money. Spend it on high-grade catnip instead. At least catnip delivers an actual high, whereas this album just gives you a migraine and a sudden urge to clean out your refrigerator.
Be Here Meow. The Void has spoken.
