Ministry Crosses Over ... : **** MINISTRY, “Psalm 69”, <i> Sire</i>

Ministry is the Chicago band that is the leading exponent of “industrial” music, the angry, pumping, double-time disco that has long been acknowledged as the next big thing. And because the “industrial” genre has suddenly surged in popularity despite the fact that neither of its biggest stars has put out a full album since 1989, there has been an ungodly amount of pressure on Ministry to redefine rock ‘n’ roll this time around. Oddly enough, Ministry delivers.

Sometimes there is the spaciousness of prime Led Zep with the propulsion of Metallica, the angry yowling of Revolting Cocks with a relentless disco-pulse chattering on metal guitars instead of sequenced synthesizers, an almost Boulezian level of complexity with idiot-simple metal riffing. Even given that a lot of the songs melt into one another, certain individual cuts can still snap your head back: the druggy spaciness of the title track, the wasted Jerry Lee Lewis gothic of “Jesus Built My Hot Rod”; the sheer Zep-speed headbanging anthem “Scarecrow.”

The two most carefully defined types of American pop music right now may be disco and speed metal, the one cleaving to the beat and the other to the churning guitar, both above anything else extremely physical, but physical in quite different ways, and both with their hard core of loyal fans. Here Ministry combines the two forms without sacrificing the formal rigor of either, in a way that nobody has quite managed to pull off before: crossover without compromise, not only the best metal record of the year so far but possibly the best dance record too.

Albums are rated on a scale of one asterisk (poor) to four (excellent).