universal music russia – Scrambled Brains

Swapping out the occult death rock of prior album Antichrist Superstar for Bowie-influenced synthetic glam fused with up-scale industrial rock, with themes of drugs, space, alienation, and commercialization, Mechanical Animals finds Marilyn Manson taking on the MTV culture as its own aesthetic and fuel. Taking on an extra persona as a rock star from outer space, ‘Omēga,’ in a riff on David Bowie’s role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Manson digs through the hollowing effects of Hollywood, and while the near-deification of performing idols is put to good musical use, nothing of much substance is said on the subject.

The spacy motifs and glam trappings do allow for more decompressed songs than before, like the move from an acoustic guitar intro into an assemblage of drums, backing soul vocalists, and synths in “The Speed of Pain”. The album also plays with tailoring the songs more to sing-along structuring, in contrast to the didactic assaults of the previous album, as shown in “Posthuman” or the explicitly-titled “User Friendly”, and both developments come together in the sprawling “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)”.

The biggest downside is the detachment of the narrative voice from common experience as a result of its preoccupation with celebrity spheres, something it almost seems to recognize at times, e.g., the lines “Yesterday, man, I was a nihilist / Now, today, I’m just a fucking bore” in “I Want to Disappear”. Additionally, the willingness to reach outside of the familiar in the song-writing at times, as with the inclusion of the female backing singers in a couple of the songs, makes the ‘safer’ songs seem all the more insular and limited. As a platinum-selling homage to Bowie’s chameleon-like persona changes, it’s impressive, but as a stand-alone album, it rings a bit hollow, mainly due to its self-interest overwhelming outside connections.

Here’s the limited edition cover art.

Opening with a wishful litany of fatal bad luck (”I Hope You Die”), and continuing on through songs about vaginas, being a loser, breasts, what would be done with godlike powers, and blowjobs (cunnilingus having been covered in the previous album’s “Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny”), the Bloodhound Gang’s biggest album revels in juvenalia and pop culture references (e.g., “One thumb in Pulse of the Nation / One thumb in your girlfriend’s ass”), building verses around name-drops and a deep well of sexual phrases, euphemistic and not.

With song sounds ranging from Homer Simpson yelling “Holy macaroni!” on repeat, through a looped lift of the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” dovetailing into the chorus of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, to a phone-call between the song-writer and his mother on the topic of “words that rhyme with vagina,” (part of a song [”Three Point One Four”] which ends with the word “vagina” sung in falsetto eight times in a row), the album is packed with samples. But the band supplies their own instrumental material where necessary, whether than entails hiring a pair of professional vocalists just to record them singing “Recognize!” and “How do you let someone know if your hotcakes are selling well?”, crunching out a bass riff, or letting DJ Q-Ball take off with some turntable scratching.

Unfortunately, much of the non-sampled musical components, including keyboards, drums, and bass, end up sounding weirdly muddy in the mixing, an odd quality in a record which otherwise evidences so much attention to the production work. And while the group shows an impressive way with crafting hooks and accelerating vocal flow (the latter especially shows in “Right Turn Clyde”), the lyrics (e.g., “All in all / You’re just another dick with no balls / balls / balls / balls” or
“Got shot down / Like Larry Flynt / Felt like shit / Like a bowel movement”) could only be sung along to without embarrassment by those with a middle-school mind-set or superb sound-proofing

With a redneck monologue about truck stop sex set to a tinny Casio keyboard loop (”A Lap Dance is So Much Better when the Stripper is Crying”) finishing out the album before a glammy hard rock cover of ‘60s pop group The Association’s “Along Comes Mary” leads into a series of recording studio outtakes as the hidden track, the album successfully retains its contrary-minded approach to the shape of a hit album to the end. While the form and style of its break-out hit “The Bad Touch”, with its commingling of sex and pop culture (”Then we’ll do it doggy-style / So we can both watch X-Files”) gives a good general idea of the larger album’s shaping, the persistent weirdness (due in no small part to the undercurrent of near-nihilistic lethargy and ambivalence in the face of giddy sophomorism) delivers something a bit off in its aftertaste. At the same time, it’s an excellent snapshot of the American mind-set immediately preceding the 21st century, when something so gleefully profane could be such a big hit.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

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Marilyn Manson – Mechanical Animals [1998; BMG Records (Pilipinas) Inc., Interscope Records, Nothing Records, Ukrainian Records, Universal Music Korea, Universal Music Russia, Universal Music S.A.]

Bloodhound Gang – Hooray for Boobies [1999; Geffen Records, Jimmy Franks Recording Company, Republic Records, Universal Music, Universal Music (México), Universal Music Russia]