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.

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.

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