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I’ll admit to being easily annoyed by cash-in albums, whether they’re released by record labels to fulfill contracts of bands that have long moved on, or by artists themselves. Last year, Al Jourgensen announced with great fanfare the retirement of the Ministry brand name, and just a few months later, he puts out a disc of covers performed by a mishmash of the band itself, associated projects, and a mix of its various members. Seriously, Jourgensen should just have let the good name of Ministry go loudly into that good night, leaving on the high note struck by 2007’s The Last Sucker.

To be fair, Cover Up has some good moments. The shortcomings of a lot of “covers” albums usually start with weak song choices, compounded by a failure to really put a band’s own stamp on the songs. That’s not the problem here, as Ministry and its friends take over and deconstruct the chosen songs before bringing them back with a grinding industrial sheen. The classic rock cuts included here have all received generally radical makeovers. Some of them lend themselves quite well to the style, as in the case of the Deep Purple classic, Space Truckin'. Others teeter on the precipice of sacrilege, like Jourgensen and Burton Bell’s (Fear Factory) take on Under My Thumb.  There are a couple of real duds among the 11 tracks on Cover Up, including the rushed, jumbled take on Mountain’s Mississippi Queen, which was done recently, and more reverently by Ozzy Osbourne. ZZ Top’s Just Got Paid, also gets the bad end of the stick, with all the feeling stripped out and replaced with robotic programmed drum fusillades.

Some of these missteps are balanced out by a few absolute winners included on this disc, like the aforementioned Space Truckin’, the previously released version of The Doors’ Roadhouse Blues, and best of all, the cover of Radar Love. Jourgensen keeps the horns, and contributes his own B3 Organ parts, around which Sin Quirin builds a propulsive (albeit rhythmically challenged) re-imagining of the great Golden Earring track. Unfortunately, even at the album's good points, you can’t help shake the feeling that the Ministry mastermind looked around and realized that there were a few more bucks to be squeezed out of the faithful. I’m glad to have the disc, but every time I listen to Cover Up, it will be tainted by a whiff of cynical commercialism.