Review Summary: Goodbye Marilyn, Hello Brian Warner of the new age.
In the nineties when people would think of Marilyn Manson, they would think dark, sinister, and extremely controversial. Although he and his backing band have lost most of this image in the past few years with not-so-good albums compared to his hit records like Antichrist Superstar and Holy Wood, the band is still puts out albums like the glory years.
The most recent, The High End of Low could be looked at in a few different lights. In respect of the album, it is not bad by any means, much better than the previous Eat Me, Drink Me. Any fan would know though that this album could not even come close to the old albums. When viewed track-by-track it seems every song is either a hit or miss, but unfortunately all of the tracks are afflicted by the curse of horrendous lyrics. Most notably in the song
I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies where a large portion of the song is repeating “cut, cut, cut” rhythmically. The single
Arma-Goddam-Mother***ing-Geddon also has the same problem. Just read the title of the song and you will understand why. It is understandable why Marilyn would choose this as a single though because it’s defiantly what his new age fans want to hear.
The album opens with the slower slightly more mellow, but with the deep growling voice we all can recognize
Devour. Midway through the song gets louder and repeated the same verse repeatedly, “I can’t sleep until I devour you”. If this really is a high end of low album, then this song is a high, and debatably the best song on the album. Followed by
Pretty As A Swastika, a song that’s pretty much what you might expect from a song with that name. It is a half industrial song, half protest rally. The only problem is it does not make you want to protest anything; it lacks the emotion shown in the previous and other songs featured on the album.
Another excellent and emotional song is,
Running To The Edge of the World, it has slow calming acoustic verses, and when mixed with the harsh voice of Marilyn it’s actually quite a well written song. When it enters the chorus it gets a little louder but not enough to ruin the emotion any. Unfortunately the song is followed by the previously mentioned song
I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies, which is just way to long and uninteresting, you will find yourself skipping to the next song about three of the nine minutes in.
The whole album follows in this same trend of songs, good, bad, good, good, bad. The thing is though that the good songs overwhelm the bad song, making this worth checking out. Even though it’s not THE Marilyn Manson like from the nineties, you will find yourself listening to this every so often, even the not so good songs.
People need to accept that the controversial Marilyn Manson is dead. This is the new modern artist formally the Antichrist superstar, now just plain old Brian Hugh Warner, this album is what the Brian-Manson fans want, and he delivered. Musical evolution has taken its toll.
