Marilyn Manson
Heaven Upside Down
Loma Vista Recordings
2017
The point with a guy like Marilyn Manson is that once upon a time he managed to sock with an extreme look and controversial actions and videos, almost as many covers of well-known pop hits as original hits and a general vibe of “weird” that the disenfranchised post millennial youth seemed to associate with. In a society that turn more and more towards amorality and iconoclasm, he tries to retrace again what made him “famous” in the first place, but on his tenth album, this throwback of sorts, sounds tired and its pedantic nature, largely misses the point of making goth industrial rock people could “dance” to.
Stylistically it falls somewhere between “Born Villain” and “ The Pale Emperor”, but thinking about Manson’s career, he hasn’t really had a big hit or been relevant to more than his most hardcore fans, which are usually clueless overweight tattooed goths, since the very early 00’s and the “Golden Age of The Grotesque”…
The problem is that while a few songs sort of “work” in the context of what MM is all about; most are either formulaic as hell, or slow and kinda boring after a few spins... those include the leadoff single “We Know Where You Fucking Live”, the dark “Tattooed Backwards”, the jaded “Kill 4 Me”, that might be one of the better attempts, with its lounge sound and sardonic delivery, the more dance-able “Saturnalia”, or the slower and more gothic “Blood Honey”, that while it’s OK, it doesn’t have any staying power. The closer “Threats of Romance” tries to sound dramatic and epic, but barely manages to register that; on top of those mostly “mediocre” to “simply OK” songs there’s a lot of really filler material like the pseudo-rebellious “Say10” (supposed to sound like Say-Ten – Saytean – Satan – get it?!), “Revelation 12”, the childish “Je$u$ Cri$i$”, which sounds like a nursery rhyme, rather than a song and the title track that sounds like something Alice Cooper might have rejected on “Brutal Planet”…
This is an album that won’t change the status of the “god of fat”, a formerly famous, but now bloated person, who tries desperately to provoke in order to stay in the public eye, without managing to do much in the way of capturing the public ear, for the best part of the last fifteen years. Only for fans…
Stylistically it falls somewhere between “Born Villain” and “ The Pale Emperor”, but thinking about Manson’s career, he hasn’t really had a big hit or been relevant to more than his most hardcore fans, which are usually clueless overweight tattooed goths, since the very early 00’s and the “Golden Age of The Grotesque”…
The problem is that while a few songs sort of “work” in the context of what MM is all about; most are either formulaic as hell, or slow and kinda boring after a few spins... those include the leadoff single “We Know Where You Fucking Live”, the dark “Tattooed Backwards”, the jaded “Kill 4 Me”, that might be one of the better attempts, with its lounge sound and sardonic delivery, the more dance-able “Saturnalia”, or the slower and more gothic “Blood Honey”, that while it’s OK, it doesn’t have any staying power. The closer “Threats of Romance” tries to sound dramatic and epic, but barely manages to register that; on top of those mostly “mediocre” to “simply OK” songs there’s a lot of really filler material like the pseudo-rebellious “Say10” (supposed to sound like Say-Ten – Saytean – Satan – get it?!), “Revelation 12”, the childish “Je$u$ Cri$i$”, which sounds like a nursery rhyme, rather than a song and the title track that sounds like something Alice Cooper might have rejected on “Brutal Planet”…
This is an album that won’t change the status of the “god of fat”, a formerly famous, but now bloated person, who tries desperately to provoke in order to stay in the public eye, without managing to do much in the way of capturing the public ear, for the best part of the last fifteen years. Only for fans…