Marilyn Manson Almost Makes a Great Rock Record

Marilyn Manson If Marilyn Manson dropped his Antichrist crap and did fewer drugs, he could write a great rock record. As great as the recent Perfect Circle album, or Nine Inch Nails' Closer to God?the kind of record non-goths would buy, love, lend to their friends and want back after a week. The record is a concept piece, outlined on Manson's website: "The story...is about a boy who wants to become part of the world that he doesn't feel adequate for, and the bitterness and rage becomes a revolution inside him, and...the revolution becomes just another product. When he realizes it's too late, his only choice is to destroy the thing he has created, which is himself." Got that? Sounds to me like a straight-up Kurt bio, but I'll let it pass.

Holy Wood is split into four "movements," labeled "A," "D," "A" and "M," each containing four or five songs. (Also, each movement has a name, like "Of Red Earth," that doesn't correspond to its letter, but that's only important if you're a stoned teen trying to decipher Manson's "messages." He also put cool tarot cards in the booklet for you.)

The first movement is the most impressive, with a setup track called "Godeatgod" followed by a triplet of three-minute rockers: "The Love Song," "The Fight Song" and "Disposable Teens." "Disposable Teens" is the single, a by-the-letters reworking of "Beautiful People" that succeeds because of Manson's two-octaves-up vocal delivery ("We're disposable teens/We're disposable teens"). You only have to hear it once to get it stuck.

"The Love Song" and "The Fight Song" work because of monster riffs and multiple hooks?Manson seems almost desperate, saturating his tunes with rah-rah choruses to get through to Midwestern kids seduced by rap. In "The Love Song," he writes as a bullet with "a crush on a pretty pistol" and delivers the line, "Do you love your guns? (Yeah)/God?(Yeah)/Your government?/Fuck Yeah," plus a few other gems. It's the highlight of Holy Wood.

"The Fight Song" is almost as thrilling, with its shout-along chorus, "I'm not a slave/To a God/That doesn't exist." Unfortunately, it rips off Blur's "Song 2" (I mean, like in a legally troubling sense) and introduces the first of Manson's really deplorable lines: "The death of one is a tragedy/But death of a million is just a statistic." Where'd he get that, a UNICEF ad? We know, Marilyn.

Like any decent concept album, Holy Wood makes its themes clear early on, then repeats them interestingly and unexpectedly. The main ingredient is God, who shows up by name in half the songs; he is joined by guns, apes, presidents, and television in Manson's pastiche. The phrase "tear[ing] knuckles down" appears again and again, as does "flies are waiting," which preps us for the buzzing flies in the last movement that indicate our nameless hero's suicide.

"President Dead," "Cruci-Fiction in Space" and "The Nobodies" are all good tunes, with real hooks and decent lengths?Manson knew that to get away with a 19-track album, he'd have to keep the songs short. The result is pleasant and accessible, as Holy Wood has nothing more than five minutes long.

The band itself (Ginger Fish, John 5, M.W. Gacy and Twiggy Ramirez) is as on as can be, playing derivative but vital industrial-lite under Manson's snarled vocals. There is nothing spectacular about any one of them, and no standout musical parts to speak of, but the sound is big and solid. Also, the production (by Manson and cohort Dave Sardy) is stellar, with enough hidden voices and noises to keep those stoned kids glued to their headphones.

Yes, "Valentine's Day" starts just like "When the Levee Breaks," "Born Again" and "King Kill 33°" ape Nine Inch Nails disgustingly, and there are several indistinguishable acoustic songs. And yes, it sometimes seems that Manson has a bad grasp of syllables, trying to stretch or squish words over beats where they don't belong. But overall, Holy Wood is pretty tight; at the very least, it should remove Marilyn Manson from the "talentless goth wallower" portion of your brain and put him in the "annoying rock star with chops" section. Only celebrity bloat and groaners like "the atom of Eden/was a bomb" keep this from being the killer record that Manson is still likely to deliver.