MARILYN MANSON — Smells Like Children (review)

MARILYN MANSON — Smells Like Children album cover EP · 1995 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
1.5/5 ·
Warthur
Smells Like Children was originally meant to be an EP of remixes of Dope Hat from Portrait of An American Family, but Manson and crew went a little over the top with it and before they knew it they had an album's worth of remixes and reinterpretations of songs from their debut album, plus a brace of intriguing cover versions and a few tracks of spooky quasi-ambient sound effects and disturbing conversations to pad things out a bit.

In fact, that's the first problem with the EP - there's 12 minutes (not counting the concluding hidden track) of what is rather boring filler padding the thing out. On top of that, not all of the fully developed songs are equally interesting; in particular, Diary of a Dope Fiend is an attempt at a doom metal reinterpretation of Dope Hat which stands as convincing proof that you can't just slow down a regular metal song and get an aesthetically interesting doomy track, whilst Kiddy Grinder gets repetitive even for a dance remix.

To be honest, this disc could have been much better if it had been kept to EP length. When I still bothered to keep any of it at all, I'd trimmed it down to the four best tracks: the band's admittedly excellent cover of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) to lead off with, followed up by Everlasting Cocksucker and Dance of the Dope Hats, which are the two most successful remix/reinterpretations of old material and addictively danceable with it, and then rounding things out with the cover version of Rock 'n' Roll Nigger, which is a dirty industrial reworking of the song which is a neat segue between the band's early material and the approach they would take on Antichrist Superstar.

Those four songs are a hell of a lot of fun - the Sweet Dreams cover is an outright classic and was responsible for knocking the score of this thing up by a whole star - and an EP with just them on would have got a high rating, but in its current form the disc just has far too much filler to get a high score. As of 2021, I've taken away that bonus star for Sweet Dreams and no longer retain any part of the EP; regardless of whichever side of the Marilyn Manson abuse controversy you are (and I'm inclined to believe the accusers in this instance), the fact is that hearing Manson singing about abuse is too on the nose and will likely remain a bit too on the nose for the foreseeable future.
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