Heard in a club, the omnipresent, room-shaking beat itself isn't much different from the foundations of disco or hard rock, but the beat isn't cushioned with melodies or warm harmonies. And like disco, most industrial rock is created in the studio, where its better producers pour on jarring special effects. Bleak and airless, sometimes atonal, industrial rock pounds home despairing, ominous messages while its leather-jacketed devotees dance.

Ministry, from Chicago, performed behind a chain-link fence that the singers shook and climbed upon; for one song, a member of the road crew sang, scaled the fence and jumped down into the crowd. Braziers held flames for some songs; films of nearly abstract industrial images -machine parts, electric lights - were projected above the musicians. But of the three bands, Ministry least needed its special effects, because the music itself had ample variety as well as brute force.

In its current lineup, Ministry had as many as nine musicians on stage, including two drummers and three or four guitarists. And where Ministry's older songs stayed close to synthesizer-driven dance music, the band has now applied the beat to heavy-metal, speed-metal, rap and a hard-rock reggae hybrid. Alain Jourgensen, Ministry's leader, railed in his scratchy voice against hyprocrisy and complacency or explored nihilism (''I only kill to know I'm alive - so what?''), sometimes ceding the microphone to other band members and, in an encore, a guest rapper. While the band sometimes sounded imitative - of Slayer, Public Image Ltd., Erasure and U2 - Ministry makes its claustrophobic rage believable.

KMFDM, from West Germany, was closer to unintentional kitsch. The four-man band usually leans toward the heavy-metal side of industrial rock; its guitarist wore ripped nylons and posed like a glitter-rocker as its singer, wearing sunglasses, chanted in a purposeful growl. The four-man band moved between dominance-and-submission love songs and exhortations to ''Rip the System''; it dedicated ''Murder,'' a hard-rock rap, to the Palestinian uprising, condemning murder but concluding, ''Blessed are those who struggle.'' KMFDM had a programmatic, dutiful flavor, as if it had chosen its postures and topics, like ''dirty love,'' from an underground-rock handbook.

Controlled Bleeding, from New York City, moved away from conventional song forms in order to pound and snarl even more obsessively; the band avoided its more melodic repertory. Paul Lemos's vocals were fed through electronic distortion that made them largely unintelligible, except for stray words like ''genocide'' and ''torture'' or a line like ''This is a time of no desire.'' The set began with a slow, broad beat, more ritualistic than danceable, and only gradually sped up; for the finale, two band members wielded pipes to bash an oil drum and a metal box. Their noise was intended to sound threatening -but it was also, clearly, a guilty pleasure.