MARILYN MANSON'S THE HIGH END OF LOW

I have to say I specifically enjoy watching the BBC series WALKING WITH DINOSAURS. It’s got action, it’s got drama, it’s got endearing characters (giant and mysterious scaly things that went extinct some 65 million years ago: what’s not to like?), in short, it’s truly fascinating. And the WALKING WITH... series has more volumes than just the dinos: prehistoric mammals, mysterious giants from before the cretaceous, it’s a monster party for the cryptozoologist that sleeps in all of us (or some of us at least...).

I’m not sure in which of these volumes, but there is a particularly poignant scene that I vividly remember. I think the character was some sort of huge carnivorous mammal. It was on some sea shore, hunting, lonely. The narrator, with the dramatic tones only BBC narrators can muster, explained that this intrepid hunter was the last of its kind, about to become extinct. The climate of the planet was on the move, shifting in a way that was not favorable to this and other species. The animal, busily trying to break some sort of huge sea turtle, would never mate, for whatever life span it had left. Unbeknownst to itself: the very last one.

When I think of Marilyn Manson, I am reminded of that tragic mammal. For he is, after all, the last of his kind: theatrical glam rockers are a thing of the past, nearly extinct despite all their stage tricks. Dita Von Teese was maybe a mate for his very unique species, but he divorced her, and there’s no one else I can see who would have the genes to save that animal.

And when I listen to his latest album, THE HIGH END OF LOW, I am reminded of the sad scream of that nearly extinct mammal, all those millions of years ago.

His previous delivery had charmed me for its expressive, if somewhat childish, trailer-park-vampire sound. There was something almost hillbilly in the way the guitars wailed. Darkly so, and more grotesque than any of Manson’s previous offerings. I enjoyed that, it was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise progressively tedious discography. (THE GOLDEN AGE OF GROTESQUE and HOLY WOOD didn’t lack for interesting moments, but there was nothing that we hadn’t heard him sing before, and with more conviction.) This new album, with the return of Twiggy Ramirez on the guitar and Chris Vrenna of Tweaker fame on keyboards, gives us little more than a return to his previous heavy-electro-metal beats, an approach that is tired at best and that he doesn’t much renew beyond a few numbers that almost sound like outtakes from EAT ME, DRINK ME, only with more of the studio elements that created his biggest successes.

Don’t get me wrong. This is still some good shit. It’s always fun to watch our favorite techno-ghoul play shock-the-christians. How can I not smirk when I hear Marilyn singing: «Everyone will come, everyone will come to my funeral - To make sure that I stay dead»? It’s always fun to see the glam-rocker in action. He’s still doomed, condemned as a musical figure straight from a twentieth century that gets further and further away by the minute.

It may not be the album I wished for. But it’s the latest of a near extinct species. So it’s got archeological value as well!