Marilyn Manson

We Are Chaos LOMA VISTA

Album number 11 from the self-appointed God Of F**k delivers a mixed bag.

It seems like a long time ago that Marilyn Manson was America’s number-one bogey man. Who needs to fear a middle-aged goth when there’s an actual monster occupying the White House, troops on the streets and decades of pent-up frustration at social injustice ready to ignite at any minute? With his eleventh album, Manson isn’t here to conjure evil, darkness and mayhem, he’s here to reflect the terrors that are already out there. ‘I can stick a needle in the horror and fix your blindness,’ he growls in Red Black And Blue, the satisfyingly portentous opener of We Are Chaos. ‘My eyes are mirrors/All I can see is gods on the left and demons on the right.’

These baroque, doom-laden proclamations are Manson’s bread and butter, and We Are Chaos is stuffed with them (although the Captain Obvious Award goes to the whispered: ‘You’re dead longer than you’re alive’ in Infinite Darkness, the only song on the album to dip its toe into the industrial-goth clangour he built his empire on). Meanwhile, damage as a style choice is unpicked in Perfume, which, given that Manson was named as one of style magazine GQ’s most fashionable men in 2019, he should know about better than most. It’s all deliberately abstract, blackened poetry designed to be contemplated and then mentally moulded to fit the lived experience of the individual listener. That, of course, would rely on people wanting to give this record repeated listens, which is more questionable.

On his latest record the shock and awe of the old Manson is conspicuous by its absence. With its anthemic, rabblerousing chorus that walks the line between rock’n’roll and musical theatre, the title track is an album high point that sounds uncannily like it strolled in straight from the My Chemical Romance songbook, right down to the outsider solidarity of its central message: ‘We are sick, fucked up and complicated/We are chaos, we can’t be cured.’

Unfortunately, from there it becomes unfocused, at one moment overstuffed and indigestible on the Beatlesy Paint You With My Love, the next drab and unremarkable on the doomy Half-Way & One Step Forward. The Bowie influence of Manson’s Mechanical Animals era raises its head in the lush, string-strewn Don’t Chase The Dead, but from a thrilling start the album trails off to be more and more forgettable as it progresses, the God Of Fuck becoming increasingly limp as side two comes to a close. Nevertheless, it’s good to have the king of modern mischief back to cast a milky eye over the mess we’ve got ourselves into. ■■■■■■■■■■