Starting more promptly than fans might have anticipated, Front Line Assembly kicked off the evening with a hefty serving of EBM-flavored industrial. That would be electronic body music, not EDM, or electronic dance music. There’s an important difference, fans will tell you.
Bill Leeb — originally of pioneering industrial group Skinny Puppy — and company kicked off the evening with the song “IED” from 2010’s Improvised.Electronic.Device. Sticking to pre-2013 material, the group made its way through “Killing Grounds” and “Deadened” from that year’s Echogenic, stopping off to perform the 2009 single “Plasticity.” The band even threw in a rousing cover of Falco’s 1985 hit “Rock Me Amadeus” before closing out with serious crowd-pleasers “Mindphaser” and “Millennium,” from 1992’s Tactical Neural Implant and 1994’s Millennium, respectively.
Synth-rock pioneer Gary Numan took the stage next, opening with the darkwave-flavored Industrial sound of “Intruder,” the title track of his most recent album, which dropped in 2021. It met with hearty applause from fans.
Numan played a delicious sampling of songs from albums ranging from 2000’s Pure through his latest. All the while, he danced around the mic stand, his gestures resembling those of a goth-tinged belly dancer. As he performed songs including “Halo,” “Everything Comes Down to This,” “Haunted” and “My Name Is Ruin,” the latter bearing Middle Eastern-sounding melodic touches, thin columns of light flickered around him like lightning.
As he whirled like a dervish to the music, Numan appeared to be having every bit as much fun as his audience. However, it was the perennial favorites “Metal” and “Cars” from 1979’s mainstream breakthrough The Pleasure Principle that brought the most heartfelt cheers. That was particularly apparent when the anticipatory wobble of the modulated synth in “Cars” gave way to the song’s explosive downbeat.
The final dish of the evening, Chicago’s industrial-metal antiheroes Ministry, served up nourishment that definitely wasn’t a terrible thing to taste. The first half of the show largely consisted of numbers culled from the band’s 2021 album Moral Hygiene.
Frontman Al Jourgensen took the stage with a cowboy hat covering his suspiciously age-defying dreadlocks, egging on the audience as it chanted the “Let’s get ready!" refrain of opening number “Alert Level.” Much to the crowd’s delight Jourgensen also saw fit to include a cover of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” which veered from stuttered Industrial to chuggy metal. A signature echo rung out from every one of the frontman’s hoarse growls to brilliant effect.
At that point, Jourgensen brought out his trusty bullhorn, which would see effective reuse later in the evening. After previewing a new song, “Goddamn White Trash,” from Ministry’s forthcoming album — tentatively titled Hopium for the Masses — he took a moment to thank the crowd for listening to the band’s more recent material even when he knows they were there to “hear some old shit.”
On cue, Ministry drove the crowd absolutely wild with “NWO” from 1992’s Psalm 69. That gave way to the same album’s “Just One Fix,” which the band played as William Burroughs’ spectral visage loomed above, the Beat writer scowling, speaking and sometimes shooting a shotgun. As if the crowd wasn’t already at a fever pitch, Ministry broke into a trio of songs from 1988’s The Land of Rape and Honey— “The Missing,” “Deity” and finally, “Stigmata,” during which the bullhorn reappeared.
The band closed the night with “Thieves” and “So What” from 1989’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, the latter serving as its sole encore. Blinding strobe flashes interspersed with Jorgensen’s best monkey calls during the final number, which drove the crowd into a frenzy.
Having sated the audience, Jourgensen thanked San Antonio for coming out, dropped the mic and exited the stage. The band played each other out one by one, leaving just the rhythm section to close out the song.
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