What is the best Marilyn Manson album?
Taking advantage of the fact that The Pale Emperor goes on sale, we look for the best album of his career.
We embarked on the search for the best Marilyn Manson album, encouraged by the release of her new album The Pale Emperor, whose review we already published a few weeks ago.
In 1994 the group shocked the whole world with their first album Portrait of an American Family, showing a shameless and provocative new point of view, using alternative metal as a vehicle.
Taking a look at the discography of this alternative metal group, we can find numerous references, among which 9 studio albums released in just over twenty years stand out. Chronologically ordered, they would be in the following order:
- Portrait of an American Family (1994)
- Antichrist Superstar (1996)
- Mechanical Animals (1998)
- Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death (2000)
- The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003)
- Eat Me, Drink Me (2007)
- The High End of Low (2009)
- Born Villain (2012)
- The Pale Emperor (2015)
In addition to the 9 studio-recorded albums, the Florida-born band also has a compilation, two EPs and live albums, including the greatest hits Lest We Forget and the live album The Last Tour on Earth.
Choosing the best Marilyn Manson album is a difficult task. However, his most representative album could be Mechanical Animals, which not only catapulted him to the top of the charts, but also promoted his most remarkable tour and the creation of the live album The Last Tour on Earth.
songs
On this album we find a very complete tracklist composed of 14 songs, all composed by Manson himself with the invaluable help of Twiggy Ramirez (current guitarist of the group, but mainly bassist in 1998):
- "Great Big White World"
- "The Dope Show"
- "Mechanical Animals"
- "Rock is Dead"
- "Disassociative"
- "The Speed of Pain"
- "Posthuman"
- "I Want to Disappear"
- "I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)"
- "New Model No.15"
- "User Friendly"
- "Fundamentally Loathsome"
- "The Last Day on Earth"
- "Eat White"
Among the singles on this album we can find some of the best known Marilyn Manson songs. A clear example is made up of songs like "The Dope Show" or "Rock is Dead", singles with which they climbed to the top of the sales charts, becoming the soundtrack of hit movies like The Matrix.
Mechanical Animals has other singles that were also successful (and controversial), such as "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)", or the "ballad" "Coma White", with which he created a whole style slower but dark and heartbreaking songs.
Apart from the singles, it is worth highlighting songs purely designed for headbanging, such as “Posthuman” or “The Last Day on Earth”. These songs are developed on frenetic drums, accompanied by a gloomy and paranoid atmosphere where the guitars with abundant distortion and their characteristic screams become the main course.
Image and video
Both the creation of the album covers and artwork and its overall concept are deeply influenced by the androgynous image of glam rock. It took inspiration from films that created great controversy, such as Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain or David Bowie's The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Contrary to the rumors that circulated after this album, the leader of the band did not undergo any type of surgery to alter his physical appearance in order to have that alien look.
The music video for their first single, "The Dope Show," continues to be one of the band's most successful songs. The influence of both Bowie and Jodorowsky is present in this video, as well as a shift towards a nihilistic perspective, as he already began to show in his previous work.
The video for his second single, “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)”, also garnered a wide variety of criticisms and opinions. Both the clip and the song address topics ranging from religion to the influence of television, through drug use and social criticism.
The third single from Mechanical Animals was “Rock is Dead”, another of Marilyn Manson's most successful and well-known songs and where it shows a profound nihilistic influence. The video is recorded in a live simulation, where once again an androgynous Marilyn Manson exposes his music in one of the environments that have always inspired him and where he unleashes his eccentricity: the stages.
Conclusion
Despite all the criticism of the band due to its many eccentricities, there is no denying the influence that Marilyn Manson has had on music throughout its history. Both his music and his aesthetics or concept have been the most groundbreaking and provocative throughout his career, but I think it is fair to say that this philosophy reached its maximum exponent in Mechanical Animals.
Still, this is just one more opinion. Which is yours?
