MARILYN MANSON — Mechanical Animals (review)

MARILYN MANSON — Mechanical Animals album cover Album · 1998 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
2.5/5 ·
Warthur
Anyone who dismisses this album as a rip-off of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is severely missing the point; when the inner booklet depicts Manson and pals as the alien rock band Omega and the Mechanical Animals it becomes crystal clear that we are in the realm of homage. (Now, Antichrist Superstar, there's the uncredited rip-off...) Mechanical Animals is probably the smartest of Manson's albums, and though it hasn't aged well and is ultimately a little thin on ideas, it deserves credit for at least going with a smarter concept than usual.

Half the songs on the album are shallow and sleazy rock numbers that put a glammy spin on the band's poppy gothy brand of industrial metal, with the subject matters being crass promotion of self-destructive habits and a jaded dismissal of rock altogether. The other half are spacey, dissociative pieces which express at once a distressing emotional numbness and a powerful desire to reach out and feel something with someone again. Together, these two halves come together to paint a more mature and convincing image of the pressures of fame and the distance between rock star image and the person behind the persona, just as Aladdin Sane was a more mature take on Ziggy Stardust.

It may be verging on dropping out of metal territory altogether, but I genuinely think it's Manson's smartest album - the moment where he claim closest to being as clever as he thinks he is. Unfortunately, the rest of his career seems to have been devoted to reassuring the fans who joined with Antichrist Superstar that he isn't ever going to do anything this experimental and unexpected again, and to living up to the worst cautionary tales aired on this album rather than taking any of the more thoughtful lessons from it and applying them to himself.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Mechanical Animals, conceptually speaking, is that ultimately the "album of two interwoven halves" concept boils down to the album just rehashing the same few basic songs over and over again: essentially, there's two basic musical ideas here, and that's enough for a single and a B-side, not a whole album.

And then in terms of execution, it's hard to avoid the impression that Manson is the least effective part of the ensemble, his tired mumbles and snarls playing out over a musical backing which might have been more interesting disentangled from the presence and ego of the band's namesake and frontman.
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