You Goddamned Son of a Bitch

Revolting Cocks was a Ministry side project formed by that group’s Alain Jourgensen and Paul Barker along with Richard23 of Front 242 and Belgian producer/multi-instrumentalist Luc Van Acker. They released a single and an album before Richard23 left. The group, now in Jourgensen’s hands, played a gig at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro on September 4, 1987, but this double LP may or may not be a document of it; Jourgensen claims in his autobiography that the recordings were terrible, so they re-recorded the set in the studio and mixed in crowd noise. Whether it’s real or fake, it’s a ferocious performance, 75 minutes of pounding beats, rumbling postpunk bass from Barker, sardonically deployed samples and waves of noisy synth. RevCo were more electronic and less metallic than Ministry, so this is music you could conceivably dance to instead of moshing. (When versions of tracks like “TV Mind” and “In the Neck” showed up on the next RevCo studio album, they’d become louder and more aggro.)