MARILYN MANSON — Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (review)

MARILYN MANSON — Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) album cover Album · 2000 · Industrial Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
I was actually surprised by how much this one has grown on me. As usual with Marilyn Manson, the album is improved if you can clear your head of all the pretentious, self-aggrandising, solipsistic nonsense Manson has said about it and give up on trying to interpret it as a narrative concept album. Instead, simply kick back and watch as Manson seizes the moment when the religious right made him the American scapegoat he'd always claimed to be - and uses it to its full advantage to launch an all out attack on the ugly tendency in American politics to embroil the three totems of "guns, god and government".

Indeed, Manson's lyrics this time around are actually the most effective they've ever been. Paraphrasing the Beatles at one point, Manson deftly creates a dire warning of a youth culture which, turning its back on the peaceful political agenda and methods advocated by the Beatles, may yet prove to be a fertile ground for the encouragement of political violence - the sort of ugly assassination culture which has cropped up again and again in American history (and the reference to James Shelby Downard's bizarre King Kill 33 conspiracy theory is surely no accident there). Add to that a near-frightening obsession with death and what you have is Manson, for one brief moment in his career, actually presenting the sort of compelling and intelligent ideas he's capable of formulating when his pretentiousness isn't getting in the way.

And musically speaking, it's a real trip too taking on sounds from pop punk to Radiohead/Pink Floyd space rock - but always with enough of a grimy industrial tinge to remind us that we're no longer in the sterile territory of Mechanical Animals. Perhaps Manson's backwards narrative concept album trilogy doesn't make a blind lick of sense - but if you approach it as a rock music meditation on a culture out to both idolise and blame transient celebrities instead of turning its sights on the real and persistent issues affecting it, Holy Wood is a fun listen.

The big problem with the album is that very much doesn't want you to take it as a fun listen - it wants you to take it as a big artistic statement, and that means it keeps getting in the way of itself. Manson's recurring JFK imagery also gets tiresome - it's like he realised he hit on something zeitgeist-ish with the Coma White music video and decided to build the entire album around it, despite the fact that the Manson-as-JFK thing ceased to be novel after the music video already explored it enough.
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