Timing is everything in pop music, and
Marilyn Manson hit a zeitgeist in the mid-'90s with
Antichrist Superstar,
riding the post-alternative wave to the top of the charts with his
dark, arty, industrial metal. He was a proud shock artist and a great
interview, one of the few rockers of his time who stood his own against
his attackers by offering articulate, informed counterarguments to their
blustering rage. Like any shock rocker, though, the novelty wears thin
fast, and what was once scary turns into self-parody.
Manson, no stranger to rock history, attempted to circumvent this by turning quickly to the left with the glam-soaked
Mechanical Animals, but in doing so he lost huge portions of his audience, and by the time he returned to scary industrial metal form on
Holy Wood in 2000, he seemed out of date and few critics or fans paid attention. Three years later, he unleashed his fifth album,
The Golden Age of Grotesque,
and he still seemed out of step with the times, but there was a
difference -- he sounded comfortable with that development. Also, by
2003, rock, particularly heavy metal, was in desperate need of artists
with a grand vision and ambition, which
Manson has in spades. After all,
The Golden Age
is designed to be a modern update of German art, vaudeville, and
decadent Hollywood glamour of the '30s, all given a thudding metallic
grind, of course. In an era when heavy rockers have no idea what
happened in the '80s, much less the '30s, it's hard not to warm to this,
even if his music isn't your own personal bag.
Musically,
Manson isn't departing from his basic sound -- he's following through on the return to basics
Holy Wood
represented -- but his first self-production has resulted in an album
that feels light and nimble, even though it's drenched in distortion and
screams. It feels as if
Manson
now feels liberated from not being consistently in the spotlight, and
his music has opened up as well. With that new freedom, he gets silly on
occasion -- the gibberish on the ridiculously titled "This Is the New
Sh*t," the appropriation of
Faith No More's
"Be Aggressive" for "mOBSCENE," the lyric "You are the church/I am the
steeple/When we f*ck we are God's People" -- but instead of knocking the
record off track, they are part of the big picture on this oversized
album. What matters here, as it always does on a
Marilyn Manson album, is the overarching concept, and while
The Golden Age of Grotesque
has some kind of theme, its particulars aren't discernible, but the
overall feeling resonates strongly. This messy, unruly, noisy burlesque
may fall on its face, but it puts itself in the position where it can
either stand or fall, and, unlike in the past,
Manson
isn't taking himself so seriously that he sounds stiff. It all adds up
to a very good album -- maybe not his best, and certainly not one that
will attract the most attention, but it's a hell of a lot grander than
what his peers are producing, and holds its own with his previous
records. It's also a bit more fun, too, and that counts for a lot.
tags: marylin, manson, the golden age of grotesque, 2003, flac,
