Published on May 22, 2003
I’ve been a fan of Marilyn Manson since 1996. I bought all the
albums (except the live one). The first three studio albums are
great, and the fourth one is very good too (not counting
Smells Like Children, which is an oddities album). But the
brand new full length disc,
The Golden Age Of Grotesque, is a HUGE, let me repeat, HUGE
letdown.
I really thought that Marilyn Manson was going to take rock in a
fresh new direction; after all, he’s been hyping this album as a
sex-drenched hybrid of electronic rhythms and the decadent sounds
and spirit of 1920s Berlin for the last year or two. My mouth
practically watered over the potential of such a stylistic
departure. Unfortunately, isn’t anything like that. It’s fucking
boring. Tired, generic riffs and more than the usual screaming
adorn the same old industrial-metal proceedings, except this time
there aren’t any cool melodies or exotic sounds to be found for the
most part.
The man totally ran out of ideas, and now he’s just rehashing
his old sound, just not nearly as well as he used to. The album
rocks very hard and the signature Manson sound is in place, but to
me that’s part of the problem. There are simply far too many parts
that sound far too familiar because they’re poorly disguised
reworkings of older material (eg. see the first single,
“mOBSCENE”). Tracks like “This Is The New Sh*t” (also on the
Matrix Reloaded Soundtrack) and the dancehall swing
influenced “Doll Dagga Buzz Buzz Ziggety Zag” (whose great
potential is wasted) stand out above the mediocre rest but
nonetheless fail to match the heights of Manson’s past career
defining
Anti-Christ Superstar and
Mechanical Animals albums.
Overall,
The Golden Age Of Grotesque is extremely uninspired. I’m now
convinced that Marilyn Manson is not nearly as artistically
creative as he would have us think, despite his brilliance at
marketing himself that way. And the hoopla about collaborating with
the controversial Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein? Big effing
deal. All the artwork and pictures in the booklet are nothing new,
and no different than anything else Manson did before. The CD even
came with a bonus dvd of a short “artsy” film called
Doppelherz that Manson and Helnwein made. It’s a useless,
annoying, pretentious piece of shit that’s supposed to be “deep”
yet looks like it was made on the spot completely at random with a
cheap-ass camera. The best thing I can say about it is that he has
great taste in women. Ye gods, you don’t know how disappointed I
am.
I guess my expectations simply exceed his talent.
First CD I bought in at least a year, and it sucks. That’s what
I get for not sampling any of the tracks beforehand online. Thanks
for eroding my little remaining faith even further, recording
industry.
If you want good, heavy, and extremely well-crafted shock rock,
then I suggest you go straight to the source and check out the
latest albums by Alice Cooper. Pretty ironic that the 55-year-old
Cooper creatively still runs circles around the likes of a
supposedly relevant contemporary artist such as Marilyn Manson.
Take some tips from daddy, Mr. Warner!