Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000)
To an extent, this does feel like a response to the mixed fan reception of Mechanical Animals, but it's still fairly experimental in it's own way: It actually feels a bit like an attempt to meld the new wave, glam rock, and moody ballads of Mechanical Animals with the heavier sound of Antichrist Superstar and ...American Family. There a few moments where this can lead to some transparent self-cannibalization: lead-off single "Disposable Teens" almost sounds like they went out of their way to cross "Rock Is Dead" with a sped up "The Beautiful People", although it's a fairly catchy song anyway. For the most part, this approach works pretty well though, whether it's tempering fairly heavy riffs with a more melodic vocal approach or giving the quieter or more experimental tracks heavier choruses.
At times it's also the closest so far that Marilyn Manson has come to sounding like a conventional rock band - sometimes the only "industrial" element in songs is harsh, distorted vocals, making them sound more like Alternative Metal if anything. This can have both positive and negative results - the more aggressive songs rock harder in this setting than they would in Antichrist Superstar 's deliberate murk, but can end up sounding a bit generic as well. It does still end up feeling like a fairly diverse album though - rockers and ballads get equal distribution for the first time, and there are a few interesting developments: "Valentine's Day" has Manson using his lower register almost to the point of not sounding like himself, and might actually be more New Wave than anything off Mechanical Animals - my immediate reaction was "Oh, that's why they have a Gary Numan cover". Elsewhere, "King Kill 33°" is one of the heaviest-sounding songs on the album despite mainly being based around a really scuzzy synth-riff, and closer "Count To 6 and Die" stands out among the other ballads for being based around a tense, haunting piano melody.
I guess I'm also going to add a few more things to the "Jimmy Hart Version or not?" file here too... The most cited ones here are "The Fight Song" and "Lamb Of God": "The Fight Song" is supposedly a "Song 2" knockoff, but I don't really see it beyond a vaguely similar rhythm and the ever-popular loud-soft-loud effect. There are a few points where the vocal melody of "Lamb Of God" sounds awfully similar to 'Climbing Up The Walls', but it otherwise veers far enough in another direction to be too derivative. One I actually haven't seen brought up is "Born Again" being based around a similar beat to "Tomorrow Never Knows", but that's got to be more of a musical Shout-Out anyway, especially because there are recurring lyrical references to The Beatles and John Lennon throughout the album.
One of the main things that makes this album interesting is that the lyrics are more likely to be on the thoughtful and introspective side: Much of it definitely reads as a response to Moral Guardians blaming the band for Columbine, and the main theme seems to be that there is something in our culture that leads to tragedies like this, but it has more to do with media sensationalism and thinking ignoring social problems will make them go away than it does with rock lyrics or whatever else The New Rock & Roll happens to be. A couple of my favorite lines are "Nothing suffocates you more than / the passing of everyday human events / Isolation is the oxygen mask you make / Your children breathe to survive" and "we light a candle on an earth we made into hell / and pretend that we're in heaven".
Key Tracks: The Nobodies, Target Audience (Narcissus Narcosis), Valentine's Day
Disposable Teens, Part 1 (2000)
This one has two non-album tracks - "Diamonds And Pollen" and a cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero". the former is unusual in and of itself, since, as you might have noticed reading through this, Marilyn Manson b-sides are nearly always covers, live versions, or remixes. This is either the first or the second time one of their singles has had an original unheard song on it, depending upon whether you consider "Revelation #9" a "song".
The Lennon cover isn't entirely successful, but it is better than I expected. True, it does end up highlighting how limited Manson's vocal range is, but it's very faithful to the original musically, and he delivers the cynical lyrics with enough venom without ending up being too over the top.
"Diamonds And Pollen" is the kind of oddball experimental track I think Holy Wood could have used a little bit more of. It's basically a three minute song with three different sections - in the first, Manson is reciting lyrics over a very quiet synth, some very loud bursts of distortion that slowly reveal themselves to be an actual rhythm, and some very strange combinations of guitar notes. Next, the disjointed guitar parts are accompanied by a pounding mechanical drum beat as the vocals become screams. Finally, it reaches something of a "ballad" section - the drums are still pounding away much more loudly than everything else, but there's some out of tune piano, an actual vocal melody, and a return to the disorienting Gratuitous Panning of "Fundamentally Loathsome". It's weirder and more intense than I managed to make it sound, although it does somewhat remind me of something like the title track to The Downward Spira.
Key Tracks: Diamonds And Pollen
Disposable Teens, Part 2 (2000)
Something that's sort of starting to strike me interesting about Marilyn Manson is that they sometimes go out of their way to pick covers that reflect something about their current direction. Holy Wood might not have sounded much like The Doors, but "Five To One" is sort of a good compliment to the album because of the us vs. them mentality of the lyrics, and of course in general Jim Morrison makes sense as someone who'd be a formative influence. Their rendition of the song can't compete with the original, but it is a pretty entertaining Mansonization of it: I particularly like John 5 replicating Robby Krieger's guitar solo and the fact that they throw in a nod to the most infamous bit of "The End" too.
Oh, and "Astonishing Panorama of the End Times" is the only other b-side here. I already wrote about it, so I guess I'll add that for being released a year earlier and written earlier than that, it does fit in pretty well with Holy Wood era material.
Key Tracks: Five To One
The Fight Song, Part 1 (2001)
The only B-Side here is a remix of "The Fight Song" by Slipknot, also available on the soundtrack to the first Resident Evil movie. It's a quality remix though, and in fact it might even improve upon the original song. It's not a drastic rearrangement - in fact, by being a remix credited to an entire band a lot of the original elements of the song are retained. However, as you might expect, it brings the heaviness of the song out a bit more, especially due to their trademark barrage of percussion.
Key Tracks: The Fight Song (Slipknot Remix}
The Fight Song, Part 2 (2001)
Two remixes and a live take on "The Fight Song" itself. The mostly instrumental Bon Harris remix of "Disposable Teens" builds a lengthy trip-hop groove around the bass-line and guitar riff of the original. It actually builds up quite nicely for it's eleven minutes, and gets some bonus points for incorporating samples of "Jesus Loves The Little Children" that actually fit the chord changes perfectly. "The Love Song" is also remixed by Bon Harris, this time with Marilyn Manson member Madonna Wayne Gacy. It's less successful than the "Disposable Teens" mix due to feeling more repetitive, but it's got a nice, super-deep bass-line that sound particularly cool when the "Do you love your god? Guns? Government?" part comes up. Finally, the live version of "The Fight Song" doesn't add anything particularly new and isn't even as well-recorded as the Last Tour On Earth stuff, but it does start with an interesting bit of stage banter: "This next song's for every dad that said you wouldn't amount to be anything at all. This next song's for every teacher who said you were fuckin' stupid! And this next song is for every priest who said you were goin' to hell!".
Key Tracks: Disposable Teens (Bon Harris Mix)
The Nobodies (2001)
Live versions of "The Nobodies" and "The Death Song". First of all, I want to say I've gradually come to think of "The Nobodies" of itself as one of the best tracks on Holy Wood - it's one of the more successful combinations of Mechanical Animals-era electronics with a heavier sound, and the bridge nicely sums up Holy Wood's take on Columbine ("Some children died the other day / we fed machines, and then we prayed / puked up and down in morbid faith / you should have seen the ratings that day"). The live version here, unfortunately, loses a bit of power due to a mix that drowns out the synthesizers in the verses and makes the percussion sound too flat. A little bit more interesting is the take on "The Death Song" - again the sound quality isn't great, but it does feature a cool guitar tone not heard in the studio version. It also starts out with another Manson monologue, this time mentioning the Christian protesters outside the concert, quoting some (out of context) nnti-youth passages from the bible, and ultimately asking "Who is a worse influence, God or Marilyn Manson?".
Key Tracks: The Death Song (With Bible Speech)
Tainted Love (2002)
The theme of the Not Another Teen Movie soundtrack was contemporary rock bands covering New Wave songs, an idea probably chosen to go with it's occasional spoofs of 80's teen movies along with then-current ones. Thus, we have Marilyn Manson covering Soft Cell's cover of Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love". A cover of a cover is kind of a dicey proposition in my book. However, honestly if you've heard any songs by Soft Cell other than "Tainted Love", they kind of make sense as a band who'd be an influence on a certain side of Marilyn Manson - I mean they have a song called "Sex Dwarf" for crying out loud. Honestly, both in theory and in practice, this cover is one of the cheesiest things they've ever done, but it's sort of fun. The arrangement is an odd but entertaining mix of industrial metal and a pop groove that almost sounds like something Timbaland would come up with, and Manson does sell the lovelorn melodrama of the lyrics in his own way.
Two out of the three b-sides here are actually other Not Another Teen Movie covers by other bands - Mest covering Modern English's "I Melt With You" and Stabbing Westward covering New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle". While I'm not here to talk about them, I'm going to point out that they kind of exemplify my problem with the trend of "alternative" or pop punk eighties covers that peaked around this time: Both predictably add absolutely nothing new to the original songs except louder guitars. That said, hey, the guy from Stabbing Westward can actually sing pretty well.
the other Marilyn Manson track is another cover from another soundtrack - "Suicide Is Painless" (best known as the M*A*S*H theme but with Forgotten Theme Tune Lyrics), from Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows. This version takes the song much more seriously than it was meant to be taken, but is still an interesting, eerie rendition, and it's probably the most subtly creepy thing the band have done yet.
Key Tracks: Tainted Love, Suicide Is Painless
