Ministry certainly falls into the latter category and their debut longplayer smacks of blatant commerciality…blatant, misguided, and downright silly commerciality.

Hailing from the urban mecca of Chicago, Alain Jourgenson and Steven George formed Ministry in 1981 as a funk-tinged synth duo, scoring a couple minor dance hits before inking a deal with Arista Records.

Despite a pedigree that included a stint in the hard-edged alt-rockers Special Affect (a band that also included future My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult founder Groovy Mann), Jourgenson’s vision on With Sympathy was single-mindedly aimed at the charts.

(Ministry circa 1983: Al Jourgenson, left, and Steven George)

How else does one explain such tracks as “Work For Love” and “What He Say?” — the latter a laughably kitschy blend of synth-pop and, uh, world music…I think.

The album actually gets off to a promising start, with pulsating hard-synth rockers “Effigy (I’m Not An)” and “Revenge” setting the scene for what I had initially hoped was a synth record with some backbone to it. While those two tracks were a perfect combination of Jourgenson’s brash persona and knack for creating aggressive synth grooves, each song thereafter seems created for the sole purpose of prostrating himself before the synth-pop crowd.

No wonder Jourgenson has spent the better part of three decades trying to live this one down, putting on one helluva “tough-guy” act in the process.

Granted, the bad taste this album’s failure left in Jourgenson’s mouth would lead him to adopt quite the devil-may-care attitude, taking his music underground. The resulting album, Twitch, was both groundbreaking and unrelenting in its singular vision and remains one of the most influential industrial rock recordings of all time…for what that’s worth.

But what about those BPAs that really weren’t all that bad?

One such album is Kix’s 1983 release Cool Kids. I remember seeing the cover and thinking the band had a bit of a Ramones vibe going on. They looked metal, of course, but these were the days before “hair metal,” so the shaggy manes weren’t an automatic turn-off. I was in the mood to rock and these guys looked like they might just deliver, so I bought the album.

What I heard both confused and delighted me. Imagine, if you will, a band that looked like a Baltimore street gang (not that I’ve actually seen a Baltimore street gang, mind you) coming at you with a synth-heavy mix of bubblegum and vintage AC/DC. It’s a weird mix on paper and even weirder coming through the headphones, but once I wrapped my teenage mind around it, I was hooked.

“Cool Kids” is the kind of song that should’ve been blasting out of radios during the summer of ’83, a pitch-perfect slice of teen angst set against staccato guitars and a tight-as-a-prom-date (did I really just type that?) bass line. Seriously, download this bad boy and give it a spin. If you aren’t rockin’ the air guitar in your cubicle by the first chorus, we may wanna start feelin’ for a pulse, brah.

“Loco-Emotion” continues in a similar vein, mixing percolating synths during verses that are just as sing-along as the Firebird-approved chorus. The only downside to this gem of a track is a hilariously misguided sax break at the 2:16 mark. If not for that, I’d be hard-pressed to find any reason for this track remaining such a well-kept secret.

A precursory glance at the writing credits reveals some interesting names. Holly Knight (a writer-for-hire best known for such vanilla pop hits as “Obsession,” “Love Is a Battlefield,” and “Better Be Good to Me”)? Nick Gilder (he of “Hot Child in the City” fame)? Normally, seeing such names should strike fear into the hearts of the faint, but here, the damage is kept to a minimum. In fact, the outside material meshes incredibly well with the band’s own material, resulting in an album that sounds like a unified effort rather than a hodgepodge of mismatched ingredients.

“Nice on Ice” and “Mighty Mouth” are probably the best unadulterated Kix tracks, free of kitschy synthesizers and other bells and whistles employed on much of the rest of Cool Kids. While revisiting these tracks for the first time in 20-odd years, it dawned on me that Kix was probably about three or four years ahead of their time and that a little band called Poison swiped the template right out from under these guys and rode it to the top of the charts. Bret Michaels, in fact, seems to have stolen his entire shtick from Kix’s far superior frontman, Steve Whiteman.

Sure, Kix did manage a top-ten hit of their own in 1989 with the rote power ballad “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” but, by then, many lesser bands had rocketed to platinum status by employing much the same strategy Kix displayed on Cool Kids. Too bad nobody was paying attention.

Peak chart position: #177