Marilyn Manson
The High End of Low (Interscope)

In 2009, it’s tempting to write off Marilyn Manson (both the man and the band) as yesterday’s news. Well, okay, make that last decade’s news. The Antichrist Superstar’s scare factor wore off so long ago that the Onion felt compelled to run this now-classic headline back in January 2001: “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-to-Door Trying to Shock People”. Let’s face it, there are far more blood-chilling things to worry about these days than some frog-throated miscreant welcoming you to his nightmare. Simply put, Manson’s shtick is way past its expiry date, and no amount of extra greasepaint is going to cover up the cracks.

Every now and then, though, another sort of headline reminds us that, to a certain demographic, Marilyn Manson remains scarily relevant. On May 19, a 15-year-old Louisiana boy walked into a middle-school classroom brandishing a semi-automatic gun. According to one account, the student demanded the teacher say “Hail Marilyn Manson”. When she refused, the boy fired a shot over her head, then fled to a nearby washroom and put a bullet in his own head.

The artist formerly known as Brian Warner is aware that, for every jaded critic who sees him as a joke, there are a dozen freaked-out parents for whom he can still serve as an all-purpose bogeyman, and The High End of Low suggests that this is a role he’s more than happy to fill. “I want to celebrate/I want to sell you hate/Today’s the day we’re gonna fuckin’ die,” he sings on the chorus of “Blank and White”, before following up with an even more blatant final verse: “Shoot up the mall, the school/Or whoever wants to fight”.

It’s satire, surely, but who the butt of the joke is—Manson or his critics—is open to debate. Same goes for “Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon”, on which Manson announces, “Fuck making hits/I’m taking credit for the death toll,” which reads like a declaration that maintaining his status as a provocateur takes precedence over keeping his musical career viable. Mind you, the song in question is one of the best on the album; its throbbing bass line and clap-along glam-goth beat almost compensate for the fact that its lyrics (“Fuck, eat, kill, et cetera”—and no, I’m not making that up) seem to have been written by a random shock-rock cliché generator.

In a similar vein, “We’re From America” is a head-banging blitzkrieg of admittedly awesome lite-industrial punk that underscores a predictably seditious screed. It’s not all fuck-the-world nihilism, however. “Devour”, “Unkillable Monster”, and a few others are love songs, of a self-abusive sort, seemingly inspired by the singer’s on-again, off-again relationship with Evan Rachel Wood. (They’re on again, in case you’re keeping track.)

While it’s refreshing to hear the God of Fuck sing about his personal life instead of trying to raise the hackles of mainstream America, the album as a whole would have benefited from a ruthless edit. Manson and his cohorts—Twiggy Ramirez, Chris Vrenna, and Ginger Fish—don’t really have enough fresh ideas to stretch out over 15 tracks. Too often, they build their songs on well-worn classic-rock blueprints: “Leave a Scar” has the meat-and-potatoes architecture of a BTO tune, while “Running to the Edge of the World” welds the acoustic strum of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to a power-ballad chorus that strains in vain to sound epic.

For all its bloated inconsequence, however, The High End of Low contains at least a couple of songs that rank with Marilyn Manson’s best. But is anyone outside the ranks of the Trenchcoat Mafia still listening?

Download This: “Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon”